{"ID":2921602,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-02T02:42:49.606572591Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-03T05:56:00.181519634Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01045","arxiv_id":"2606.01045","title":"Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs","abstract":"Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not production, which is central to usage-based theories of language acquisition which argue how CDS facilitates early language use through constructional ''frames'' (frequent lexical patterns with open slots). We introduce a novel generation-based evaluation inspired by such theories in form of a frame-completion task, and compare Llama models trained with CDS, the BabyLM corpus, and web-crawl data (FineWeb-edu) on comprehension benchmarks and our novel framework. Our results reveal a clear dissociation between models' comprehension and production capabilities: while FineWeb-trained models excel at minimal pairs, CDS-trained models produce grammatical completions substantially earlier in training and concentrate probability mass on appropriate slot-fillers. These findings show that comprehension benchmarks underestimate what CDS affords to BabyLMs.","short_abstract":"Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not production, which is central to usage-based theories of language acquisition which argue how CDS facilitates early language use through constructi...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01045","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01045v1","authors":"[\"Bastian Bunzeck\",\"Sina Zarrieß\"]","published":"2026-05-31T06:27:58Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}