{"ID":2880656,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13769","arxiv_id":"2508.13769","title":"Can Large Language Models (LLMs) Describe Pictures Like Children? A Comparative Corpus Study","abstract":"The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, yet little attention has been paid to whether LLM-generated text resembles child language. This study evaluates how LLMs replicate child-like language by comparing LLM-generated texts to a collection of German children's descriptions of picture stories. We generated two LLM-based corpora using the same picture stories and two prompt types: zero-shot and few-shot prompts specifying a general age from the children corpus. We conducted a comparative analysis across psycholinguistic text properties, including word frequency, lexical richness, sentence and word length, part-of-speech tags, and semantic similarity with word embeddings. The results show that LLM-generated texts are longer but less lexically rich, rely more on high-frequency words, and under-represent nouns. Semantic vector space analysis revealed low similarity, highlighting differences between the two corpora on the level of corpus semantics. Few-shot prompt increased similarities between children and LLM text to a minor extent, but still failed to replicate lexical and semantic patterns. The findings contribute to our understanding of how LLMs approximate child language through multimodal prompting (text + image) and give insights into their use in psycholinguistic research and education while raising important questions about the appropriateness of LLM-generated language in child-directed educational tools.","short_abstract":"The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, yet little attention has been paid to whether LLM-generated text resembles child language. This study evaluates how LLMs replicate child-like language by comparing LLM-generated texts to a collection of German children's descriptions of picture storie...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13769","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13769v1","authors":"[\"Hanna Woloszyn\",\"Benjamin Gagl\"]","published":"2025-08-19T12:13:54Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}