Repetition Without Exclusivity: Scale Sensitivity of Referential Mechanisms in Child-Scale Language Models
We present the first systematic evaluation of mutual exclusivity (ME) -- the bias to map novel words to novel referents -- in text-only language models trained on child-directed speech. We operationalise ME as referential suppression: when a familiar object is relabelled in a two-referent discourse context, ME predicts decreased probability of the labelled noun at a subsequent completion position. Three pilot findings motivate a pre-registered scale-sensitivity experiment: (1) a masked language model (BabyBERTa) is entirely insensitive to multi-sentence referential context; (2) autoregressive models show robust repetition priming -- the opposite of ME -- when familiar nouns are re-labelle...
| Authors | Jon-Paul Cacioli |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 March 2026 |
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