cs.CLMay 31, 2026

Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs

Authors: Bastian BunzeckSina Zarrieß

Organizations: Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics Bielefeld University, Germany

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.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Measuring Form and Function in Language Models

    May 27, 2026Héctor Javier Vázquez Martínez, Charles YangTraining Language ModelsDiscourse