The study investigates whether phonological traces of a first language persist in neural speech models after switching to a second language, mirroring phenomena observed in international adoptees. Using automatic speech recognition models trained on one language and then abruptly switched to another, researchers found that traces of the first language remained in the lowest, pre‑phonemic layers throughout second‑language training. These traces proved functional, as models with early exposure re‑learned their lost first language 14% faster than naive models, an advantage that vanished when the earliest layers were replaced with those from a non‑adopted model.
arXiv:2608. 12334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models, the latent dynamics dictating language selection remain poorly understood.
arXiv:2609.01491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing rate at which LLM agents interact with one another raises key questions about language evolution in multi-LLM-agent settings, with implic...
The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains.
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
arXiv:2609.10434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised speech foundation models are now used in a wide array of downstream applications, including traditional speech recognition and as the b...
arXiv:2608. 06300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speaking assessment systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings to mark second language (L2) learners' speaking tests, making it critical to show that their scores depend on speaking proficiency rather than irrelevant speaker attributes such as first language (L1) or age.
arXiv:2606. 24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning.
The paper investigates how language models avoid overgeneralizations by distinguishing between two types of indirect negative evidence: preemption and entrenchment. Through controlled rearing experiments on models trained on child‑caregiver conversations, the authors find that models do not exhibit verb‑specific preemption but show weak abstract preemption. Analysis of training dynamics suggests that competing structures act as indirect positive evidence rather than negative in the verb‑specific condition.
arXiv:2608.21088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mufwene's ecological model locates language evolution in competition among variants contributed by individual idiolects and in speakers' selection from...
arXiv:2608.22452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surprisal, the negative log-probability a language model assigns to a word given its preceding context, reliably predicts adult reading times. Does it...
arXiv:2606. 17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered.
arXiv:2606. 17835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.