# Is Child-Directed Language Optimized for Word Learning? A Computational Study of Verb Meaning Acquisition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12047/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00582/) (2019)
- [Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01368/) (2016)
- [Targeted Syntactic Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09031/) (2018)
- [Sudden Drops in the Loss: Syntax Acquisition, Phase Transitions, and Simplicity Bias in MLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07311/) (2023)
- [What Artificial Neural Networks Can Tell Us About Human Language Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07998/) (2022)
- [minicons: Enabling Flexible Behavioral and Representational Analyses of Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13112/) (2022)
- [Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Evaluation of Word Prediction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00187/) (2020)
- [Word Acquisition in Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02406/) (2021)
- [Is Child-Directed Speech Effective Training Data for Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03617/) (2024)
- [From Babble to Words: Pre-Training Language Models on Continuous Streams of Phonemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22906/) (2024)
- [Child-Directed Language Does Not Consistently Boost Syntax Learning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23689/) (2025)
- [Subword models struggle with word learning, but surprisal hides it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12835/) (2025)
- [The Structural Sources of Verb Meaning Revisited: Large Language Models Display Syntactic Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12482/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language (ADL). We selectively remove syntactic or lexical co-occurrence information from the model training data, and evaluate the impact of these manipulations on verb meaning acquisition. While disrupting syntax impairs learning across all datasets, models trained on CDL and spoken ADL show significantly higher resilience than those trained on written input. Tracking semantic and syntactic performance over training, we observe a semantic-first trajectory, with verb meanings emerging prior to robust syntactic proficiency, an asynchrony most pronounced in the spoken domain, especially CDL. These results suggest that the advantage for verb learning previously attributed to CDL may instead reflect broader properties of the spoken register, rather than a uniquely CDL-specific optimization.