7 papers
CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions
Francesca Padovani, Xiulin Yang, Bastian Bunzeck +4
CHILDES is a paramount resource for language acquisition studies -- yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of t…
Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs
Bastian Bunzeck, Sina ZarrieÃ
Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not produc…
Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning)
Francesca Padovani, Bastian Bunzeck, Manar Ali +4
We investigate whether pre-training exclusively on dialogue data results in formally and functionally apt small language models. Based on this pre-trained llamalogue model, we empl…
BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data
Jaap Jumelet, Abdellah Fourtassi, Akari Haga +23
We present BabyBabelLM, a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. We curate developmentally pla…
Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning In German BabyLMs?
Bastian Bunzeck, Daniel Duran, Sina ZarrieÃ
We analyze the influence of utterance-level construction distributions in German child-directed/child-available speech on the resulting word-level, syntactic and semantic competenc…
Subword models struggle with word learning, but surprisal hides it
Bastian Bunzeck, Sina ZarrieÃ
We study word learning in subword and character language models with the psycholinguistic lexical decision task. While subword LMs struggle to discern words and non-words with high…