The study trains small GPT‑2 models on child‑scale language data from dense home recordings (BabyView) and synthetic child‑directed dialogue (TinyDialogues), varying data amount, source, and diversity. Models trained on a single child’s environment predict that child’s language far better than others, a pattern largely driven by lexical and distributional factors as shown by a 5‑gram baseline. While training on multiple children improves predictions on pooled held‑out language, it does not yield a clear advantage on grammatical benchmarks, and naturalistic versus synthetic inputs produce distinct grammatical and lexical‑semantic patterns.
arXiv:2610.35029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic data has become a common resource for training language models, and this trend has spilled over into research on developmentally plausible la...
arXiv:2609.37121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-linguistic effects are a central topic in bilingual first-language acquisition. Artificial learners can help investigate L1-L2 interactions by en...
GSLM2 is a multi‑stream generative spoken language model that learns complementary speech representations at multiple abstraction levels using the SpidR 2.0 encoder and a shared‑backbone SLM with stream‑specific predictors. It improves linguistic competence and scales more efficiently than prior speech models, narrowing the performance gap with text‑based language models by about two orders of magnitude on several benchmarks. The authors release the training code and checkpoints publicly.
arXiv:2606. 01134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatically distinguishing child-directed speech from adult-directed speech in long-form recordings is key to scalable analyses of children's language environments.
arXiv:2509. 15001v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Child-centered daylong recordings are essential for studying early language development, but existing speech models trained on clean adult data perform poorly due to acoustic and linguistic differences.
arXiv:2602. 09992v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Several recent contributions have evaluated the Poverty of the Stimulus Hypothesis (PoSH) using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
The paper reviews how large language models (LLMs) are employed to study infant syntax acquisition, focusing on the BabyLM challenge that aims for human‑level syntactic performance using developmentally realistic corpora. It critically examines dataset construction, model selection, training procedures, and syntactic evaluation methods, highlighting methodological assumptions that limit the theoretical reach of these studies. The authors find that using developmentally realistic corpora has only modest impact on benchmark performance, pointing to fundamental computational differences between LLMs and actual infant syntax learners.
arXiv:2606.02615v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Few-shot prompting provides an effective way to adapt auditory large language models to low-resource tasks such as children's speech recognit...
arXiv:2606. 02615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot prompting provides an effective way to adapt auditory large language models to low-resource tasks such as children's speech recognition.
arXiv:2610.07168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Representations of translated sentences are similar in the inner layers of multilingual language models -- an observation connected to the platonic rep...
The paper investigates whether language models can transfer hierarchical syntactic knowledge from a source language (L1) to a target language (L2) using a novel cross‑lingual poverty‑of‑stimulus (CPOS) experimental design. Results show that models can partially transfer L1 structural evidence to L2, producing a small but detectable hierarchical bias that varies across language pairs. The study further demonstrates that vocabulary overlap is crucial for successful transfer, indicating that cross‑lingual learning of hierarchical generalization is conditionally achievable.
arXiv:2601. 18904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI for speech and audio is increasingly expected to serve users across languages, cultures, and communities, yet current auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) are still largely trained and evaluated on high-resource data.