Developmentally-plausible Working Memory Shapes a Critical Period for Language Acquisition

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission1299 Authors

Abstract: Large language models possess general linguistic abilities but acquire language less efficiently than humans. This study proposes a method for integrating the developmental characteristics of working memory during the critical period, a stage when human language acquisition is particularly efficient, into the training process of language models. The proposed method introduces a mechanism that initially constrains working memory during the early stages of training and gradually relaxes this constraint in an exponential manner as learning progresses. Targeted syntactic evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms conventional methods without memory constraints or with static memory constraints. These findings not only provide new directions for designing data-efficient language models but also offer indirect evidence supporting the role of the developmental characteristics of working memory as the underlying mechanism of the critical period in language acquisition.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

Research Area Keywords: cognitive modeling,computational psycholinguistics

Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1299