Which Forms of Caregiver Feedback Support Grammar Learning? A Reinforcement-Learning Study of Child-Like Language Models
Social interaction is central to children's language learning, but the effects of different forms of caregiver feedback are difficult to isolate in naturalistic data. We use child-like language models as controlled learners to test which forms of feedback support grammatical development. Small GPT-2-style models are pretrained on child-directed language from CHILDES, then fine-tuned with reinforcement learning using reward models trained to capture four feedback types: communicative feedback, structural alignment, semantic contingency, and affective feedback. Reward fine-tuning yields limited gains on minimal-pair evaluations, but clearer effects in free generation. Structural alignment p...
| Authors | Jing Liu, Marianne Schweitzer, Abdellah Fourtassi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 September 2026 |
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