Eleftheria Tsipidi, Samuel Kiegeland, Francesco Ignazio Re, Tianyang Xu, Mario Giulianelli, Karolina Stanczak, Ryan Cotterell. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Tianyang Xu, Marcelo Sandoval-Castañeda, Karen Livescu, Greg Shakhnarovich, Kanishka Misra. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Abstract Grammatical features across human languages exhibit intriguing correlations, often attributed to learning biases in humans. Language models (LMs) provide a scalable and naturalistic framework for studying artificial language learning—one not available in human research. We investigate how learnability varies across typologically plausible and implausible languages that closely follow the word order universals identified by linguistic typologists. Our study trains LMs on highly naturalistic counterfactual versions of English (head-initial) and Japanese (head-final). Compared to prior work, our datasets more precisely target the boundary between typological plausibility and implausibility. Our experiments show that LMs learn subtly implausible languages more slowly, though they eventually reach similar performance on some metrics regardless of typological plausibility. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit typologically aligned learning preferences and that certain typological patterns may emerge from general learning biases. https://github.com/sally-xu-42/Typological_Universals.

Eleftheria Tsipidi, Samuel Kiegeland, Franz Nowak, Tianyang Xu, Ethan Wilcox, Alex Warstadt, Ryan Cotterell, Mario Giulianelli. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.