3 papers
cs.CL2026
What makes a word hard to learn? Modeling L1 influence on English vocabulary difficulty
Jonas Mayer Martins, Zhuojing Huang, Aaricia Herygers +1
What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose…
cs.CL2026
Vocabulary shapes cross-lingual variation of word-order learnability in language models
Jonas Mayer Martins, Jaap Jumelet, Viola Priesemann +1
Why do some languages like Czech permit free word order, while others like English do not? We address this question by pretraining transformer language models on a spectrum of synt…
cs.CL2025
Once Upon a Time: Interactive Learning for Storytelling with Small Language Models
Jonas Mayer Martins, Ali Hamza Bashir, Muhammad Rehan Khalid +1
Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained wit…