From Exposure to Expectation: Frequency, Surprisal, and Language Across Development in Spanish
Surprisal, the negative log-probability a language model assigns to a word given its preceding context, reliably predicts adult reading times. Does it contribute as much to explaining when children acquire individual words? Frequency reflects a learner's cumulative exposure to a word, whereas surprisal reflects how predictable a single occurrence is given its context. We investigate this question across two corpus-based studies of Spanish. In Study 1, we modeled age of acquisition (AoA) for 225 Spanish nouns using lexical frequency and contextual diversity from child-directed speech, plus surprisal from three language models differing in architecture and training language (BETO, BERTIN, m...
| Authors | Francisco Portillo López |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 August 2026 |
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