A retrospective analysis on the use of LLMs to study infant syntax learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.26539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been used to investigate how children acquire syntax at an early stage of development. This is notably the central scientific goal of the BabyLM challenge, a community-wide effort to develop models that achieve human-level syntactic performance while being trained on developmentally realistic corpora. In this paper, we reflect on the use of LLMs in the study of infant syntax learning by providing an ep