3 papers
cs.CL2026
Function Words as Statistical Cues for Language Learning
Xiulin Yang, Heidi Getz, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function…
cs.CL2025
Unpacking Let Alone: Human-Scale Models Generalize to a Rare Construction in Form but not Meaning
Wesley Scivetti, Tatsuya Aoyama, Ethan Wilcox +1
Humans have a remarkable ability to acquire and understand grammatical phenomena that are seen rarely, if ever, during childhood. Recent evidence suggests that language models with…
cs.CL2025
Language Models Grow Less Humanlike beyond Phase Transition
Tatsuya Aoyama, Ethan Wilcox
LMs' alignment with human reading behavior (i.e. psychometric predictive power; PPP) is known to improve during pretraining up to a tipping point, beyond which it either plateaus o…