Language Acquisition

Description from the archive archive 2025-07-28.

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

1 leaderboard table shown for this task, 1 with rows (a “benchmark” on this site is a table with at least one row, as on /sota), ordered by row count. “Best model” is the first row in the archive's own order at snapshot; nothing is re-ranked here and metric direction is not recorded in the archive. PwC's Trend sparklines are not in the archive, so that column is omitted.

Syntology column: samples harvested from the paper's repositories and executed on synthesized fixtures; “ran” is not a correctness claim and does not order the table. A dash means no Syntology record for that paper, not a recorded non-run. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.

Libraries

Not in the archive: the export carries no per-task library table, so there is nothing to show at snapshot 2025-07-28.

Datasets archive 2025-07-28

7 datasets whose archive record lists this task, ordered by the archive's paper count.

Subtasks archive 2025-07-28

1 subtask in the archive's task tree.

Most implemented papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 83 papers with code (522 tagged with this task in all), ordered by repositories listed in the archive, not by stars (the archive holds no stars, so PwC's “Social” and “Latest” sorts cannot be reproduced). Papers without a page here are shown as plain text.

• Lexicon-Level Contrastive Visual-Grounding Improves Language Modeling
  21 Mar 2024 2 repositories listed
  Today's most accurate language models are trained on orders of magnitude more language data than human language learners receive - but with no supervision from other sensory modalities that play a crucial role in human…
• Visual Grounding Helps Learn Word Meanings in Low-Data Regimes
  20 Oct 2023 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 2 samples · 0 unverified · 2 pointer-only (licence)
  But to achieve these results, LMs must be trained in distinctly un-human-like ways - requiring orders of magnitude more language data than children receive during development, and without perceptual or social context.
• Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech
  22 Sep 2021 2 repositories listed
  We then demonstrate the utility of the compiled corpora through (1) a longitudinal corpus study of the prevalence of different syntactic and semantic phenomena in the CDS, and (2) applying an existing computational…
• Visually Grounded Continual Learning of Compositional Phrases
  2 May 2020 2 repositories listed
  To study this human-like language acquisition ability, we present VisCOLL, a visually grounded language learning task, which simulates the continual acquisition of compositional phrases from streaming visual scenes.
• Learning Music Helps You Read: Using Transfer to Study Linguistic Structure in Language Models
  30 Apr 2020 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified · 1 pointer-only (licence)
  We propose transfer learning as a method for analyzing the encoding of grammatical structure in neural language models.
• Language as a Cognitive Tool to Imagine Goals in Curiosity-Driven Exploration
  21 Feb 2020 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 1 samples · 1 unverified · 1 pointer-only (licence)
  We argue that the ability to imagine out-of-distribution goals is key to enable creative discoveries and open-ended learning.
• Multi-task Learning for Low-resource Second Language Acquisition Modeling
  25 Aug 2019 2 repositories listed
  Second language acquisition (SLA) modeling is to predict whether second language learners could correctly answer the questions according to what they have learned.
• Context Based Approach for Second Language Acquisition
  1 Jun 2018 2 repositories listed
  Our system uses a logistic regression model to predict the likelihood of a student making a mistake while answering an exercise on Duolingo in all three language tracks - English/Spanish (en/es), Spanish/English (es/en)…
• Neural Network Acceptability Judgments
  31 May 2018 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 2 samples · 2 unverified
  This paper investigates the ability of artificial neural networks to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence, with the goal of testing their linguistic competence.
• Interactive Grounded Language Acquisition and Generalization in a 2D World
  31 Jan 2018 2 repositories listed
  We build a virtual agent for learning language in a 2D maze-like world.
• Predicting and Explaining Human Semantic Search in a Cognitive Model
  29 Nov 2017 2 repositories listed
  Recent work has attempted to characterize the structure of semantic memory and the search algorithms which, together, best approximate human patterns of search revealed in a semantic fluency task.
• Semantic speech retrieval with a visually grounded model of untranscribed speech
  5 Oct 2017 2 repositories listed
  We introduce a newly collected data set of human semantic relevance judgements and an associated task, semantic speech retrieval, where the goal is to search for spoken utterances that are semantically relevant to a…
• Aligning Sentence Simplification with ESL Learner's Proficiency for Language Acquisition
  17 Feb 2025 1 repository listed
  Experiment results on CEFR-SP and TurkCorpus datasets show that the proposed method can effectively increase the frequency and diversity of vocabulary of the target level by more than 20% compared to baseline models,…
• Grammar Control in Dialogue Response Generation for Language Learning Chatbots
  11 Feb 2025 1 repository listed
  However, they are hard to control for linguistic forms that correspond to learners' current needs, such as grammar.
• ZhoBLiMP: a Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese
  9 Nov 2024 1 repository listed
  Whether and how language models (LMs) acquire the syntax of natural languages has been widely evaluated under the minimal pair paradigm.
• Less is More: Pre-Training Cross-Lingual Small-Scale Language Models with Cognitively-Plausible Curriculum Learning Strategies
  30 Oct 2024 1 repository listed
  Curriculum Learning has been a popular strategy to improve the cognitive plausibility of Small-Scale Language Models (SSLMs) in the BabyLM Challenge.
• From Babble to Words: Pre-Training Language Models on Continuous Streams of Phonemes
  30 Oct 2024 1 repository listed
  We apply this pipeline to the 100-million-word pre-training dataset from the BabyLM challenge, as well as to standard language and grammatical benchmarks, enabling us to pre-train and evaluate a model using phonemic…
• Generalizations across filler-gap dependencies in neural language models
  23 Oct 2024 1 repository listed
  Humans develop their grammars by making structural generalizations from finite input.
• From Babbling to Fluency: Evaluating the Evolution of Language Models in Terms of Human Language Acquisition
  17 Oct 2024 1 repository listed
  Notably, in generation tasks, LMs are more similar to human performance in areas where information is easier to extract from the corpus, such as average word length, clauses, and auxiliary verbs.
• Generating novel experimental hypotheses from language models: A case study on cross-dative generalization
  9 Aug 2024 1 repository listed
  This gives rise to a novel hypothesis that CDG is facilitated insofar as the features of the exposure context--in particular, its first postverbal argument--are harmonically aligned.
• Investigating Critical Period Effects in Language Acquisition through Neural Language Models
  27 Jul 2024 1 repository listed
  We vary the age of exposure by training LMs on language pairs in various experimental conditions, and find that LMs, which lack any direct analog to innate maturational stages, do not show CP effects when the age of…
• Semantic Structure-Mapping in LLM and Human Analogical Reasoning
  19 Jun 2024 1 repository listed Syntology ran 14 of 14 samples · 0 unverified · 14 pointer-only (licence)
  Recent studies have compared the analogical reasoning abilities of human subjects and Large Language Models (LLMs) on abstract symbol manipulation tasks, such as letter string analogies.
• Reframing linguistic bootstrapping as joint inference using visually-grounded grammar induction models
  17 Jun 2024 1 repository listed
  Here, we argue that they are instead both contingent on a more general learning strategy for language acquisition: joint learning.
• Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations
  22 May 2024 1 repository listed Syntology ran 5 of 5 samples · 0 unverified · 5 pointer-only (licence)
  In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning…
• Age-Dependent Analysis and Stochastic Generation of Child-Directed Speech
  13 May 2024 1 repository listed
  Child-directed speech (CDS) is a particular type of speech that adults use when addressing young children.
• Opening the black box of language acquisition
  18 Feb 2024 1 repository listed
  However, it is unclear whether or how these models represent grammatical information from the learned languages.
• Multilingual Mathematical Autoformalization
  7 Nov 2023 1 repository listed
  In this work, we create MMA, a large, flexible, multilingual, and multi-domain dataset of informal-formal pairs, by using a language model to translate in the reverse direction, that is, from formal mathematical…
• Mini Minds: Exploring Bebeshka and Zlata Baby Models
  6 Nov 2023 1 repository listed
  In this paper, we describe the University of Lyon 2 submission to the Strict-Small track of the BabyLM competition.
• Evaluating Neural Language Models as Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition
  31 Oct 2023 1 repository listed
  The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child…
• Ling-CL: Understanding NLP Models through Linguistic Curricula
  31 Oct 2023 1 repository listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified
  We employ a characterization of linguistic complexity from psycholinguistic and language acquisition research to develop data-driven curricula to understand the underlying linguistic knowledge that models learn to…

Syntology lines on 7 of the papers shown; no Syntology record for the others (a paper without an arXiv id cannot be joined to the graph, and absence from the graph layer is not a recorded non-run). “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized fixture, not that the paper's result was reproduced. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.