Measuring Form and Function in Language Models
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and accurately. We propose Contextual Alternative Choice (CAC), a new prompting method which provides targeted tests for both syntactic and discourse knowledge of language. The method enables direct comparison of language models against children, and more importantly, against statistical benchmarks independently established in empirical research. No current model trained on a comparable amount of data simultaneously meet both formal and functional benchmarks like ...
| Authors | Héctor Javier Vázquez Martínez, Charles Yang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 May 2026 |
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