Related papers: Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain

For the complex human brain that enables us to communicate in natural language, we gathered good understandings of principles underlying language acquisition and processing, knowledge about socio-cultural conditions, and insights about…

Children can acquire language from less than 100 million words of input. Large language models are far less data-efficient: they typically require 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more data and still do not perform as well as humans on many…

Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human language network. However, the key properties of language shaping brain-like representations, and their evolution during training as a function of…

Speech production requires the rapid coordination of a complex hierarchy of linguistic units, transforming a semantic representation into a precise sequence of articulatory movements. To unravel the neural mechanisms underlying this feat,…

We examine the language capabilities of language models (LMs) from the critical perspective of human language acquisition. Building on classical language development theories, we propose a three-stage framework to assess the abilities of…

This paper reviews the main perspectives of language acquisition and language comprehension. In language acquisition, we have reviewed the different types of language acquisitions like first language acquisition, second language…

Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…

We present a simulated biologically plausible language organ, made up of stylized but realistic neurons, synapses, brain areas, plasticity, and a simplified model of sensory perception. We show through experiments that this model succeeds…

Understanding the neural basis of language comprehension in the brain has been a long-standing goal of various scientific research programs. Recent advances in language modelling and in neuroimaging methodology promise potential…

Adults vary greatly in how effectively they learn a new language, but the signals driving the learning processes and individual differences remain unclear. Over seven days, we tracked behavioral learning and collected fMRI data from 102…

Understanding how infants perceive speech sounds and language structures is still an open problem. Previous research in artificial neural networks has mainly focused on large dataset-dependent generative models, aiming to replicate…

Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…

Cognition and language seem closely related to the human cognitive process, although they have not been studied and investigated in detail. Our brain is too complex to fully comprehend the structures and connectivity, as well as its…

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…

Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…

Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…

Decades of research has studied how language learning infants learn to discriminate speech sounds, segment words, and associate words with their meanings. While gradual development of such capabilities is unquestionable, the exact nature of…

Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…