Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs
arXiv:2502.18795v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on