In this short paper we employ a Language Model (LM) to gain insight into how complex semantics of a Perception Verb (PV) emerge in children. Using a Dutch LM as representation of mature language use, we find that for all ages 1) the LM accurately predicts PV use in children’s freely-told narratives; 2) children’s PV use is close to mature use; 3) complex PV meanings with attentional and cognitive aspects can be found. Our approach illustrates how LMs can be meaningfully employed in studying language development, hence takes a constructive position in the debate on the relevance of LMs in this context.

Much research has sought to evaluate the degree to which large language models reflect social biases. We complement such work with an approach to elucidating the connections between language model predictions and people’s social attitudes. We show how word preferences in a large language model reflect social attitudes about gender, using two datasets from human experiments that found differences in gendered or gender neutral word choices by participants with differing views on gender (progressive, moderate, or conservative). We find that the language model BERT takes into account factors that shape human lexical choice of such language, but may not weigh those factors in the same way people do. Moreover, we show that BERT’s predictions most resemble responses from participants with moderate to conservative views on gender. Such findings illuminate how a language model: (1) may differ from people in how it deploys words that signal gender, and (2) may prioritize some social attitudes over others.

Computational research on error detection in second language speakers has mainly addressed clear grammatical anomalies typical to learners at the beginner-to-intermediate level. We focus instead on acquisition of subtle semantic nuances of English indefinite pronouns by non-native speakers at varying levels of proficiency. We first lay out theoretical, linguistically motivated hypotheses, and supporting empirical evidence, on the nature of the challenges posed by indefinite pronouns to English learners. We then suggest and evaluate an automatic approach for detection of atypical usage patterns, demonstrating that deep learning architectures are promising for this task involving nuanced semantic anomalies.