What kinds of and how much data is necessary for language models to induce grammatical knowledge to judge sentence acceptability? Recent language models still have much room for improvement in their data efficiency compared to humans. This paper investigates whether language models efficiently use indirect data (indirect evidence), from which they infer sentence acceptability. In contrast, humans use indirect evidence efficiently, which is considered one of the inductive biases contributing to efficient language acquisition. To explore this question, we introduce the Wug InDirect Evidence Test (WIDET), a dataset consisting of training instances inserted into the pre-training data and evaluation instances. We inject synthetic instances with newly coined wug words into pretraining data and explore the model’s behavior on evaluation data that assesses grammatical acceptability regarding those words. We prepare the injected instances by varying their levels of indirectness and quantity. Our experiments surprisingly show that language models do not induce grammatical knowledge even after repeated exposure to instances with the same structure but differing only in lexical items from evaluation instances in certain language phenomena. Our findings suggest a potential direction for future research: developing models that use latent indirect evidence to induce grammatical knowledge.

The imitation of the children’s language acquisition process has been explored to make language models (LMs) more efficient.In particular, errors caused by children’s regularization (so-called overregularization, e.g., using wroted for the past tense of write) have been widely studied to reveal the mechanisms of language acquisition. Existing research has analyzed regularization in language acquisition only by modeling word inflection directly, which is unnatural in light of human language acquisition. In this paper, we hypothesize that language models that imitate the errors children make during language acquisition have a learning process more similar to humans. To verify this hypothesis, we analyzed the learning curve and error preferences of verb inflections in small-scale LMs using acceptability judgments. We analyze the differences in results by model architecture, data, and tokenization. Our model shows child-like U-shaped learning curves clearly for certain verbs, but the preferences for types of overgeneralization did not fully match the observations in children.

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language (L1) acquisition. Specifically, we trained bilingual LMs with a scenario similar to human L2 acquisition and analyzed their cross-lingual transfer from linguistic perspectives. Our exploratory experiments demonstrated that the L1 pretraining accelerated their linguistic generalization in L2, and language transfer configurations (e.g., the L1 choice, and presence of parallel texts) substantially affected their generalizations. These clarify their (non-)human-like L2 acquisition in particular aspects.