Developmentally-plausible Working Memory Shapes a Critical Period for Language Acquisition
This provides new directions for designing data-efficient language models and offers indirect evidence for the role of working memory in the critical period of language acquisition.
The study tackled the problem of language models acquiring language less efficiently than humans by integrating developmental working memory characteristics into training, showing that their method outperforms conventional approaches in syntactic evaluation.
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.