Prosodic Structure as a Critical Component in Phonemic Language Modelling at BabyLM Scale
Human children learn language from continuous, prosodically structured speech long before they can read, yet almost all language models train on orthographic text. Building on previous phonemic BabyLM training (Goriely et al., 2024; arXiv:2410.22906), we ask whether supplying an estimate of the prosody infants exploit improves phonemic language modelling at BabyLM scale. We compare an orthographic baseline to three conditions forming a ladder of phonological richness. All conditions are trained as BERT MLMs at 10M and 100M words. Addressing the ecological validity of existing metrics in the small-data regime, we build a lexical decision task and two semantic organisation tasks. Our new le...
| Authors | Bill K. S. Ku, Janet B. Pierrehumbert |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
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