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It is unknown whether these CP effects result from innately determined brain maturation or as a stabilization of neural connections naturally induced by experience. In this study, we use language models (LMs) to test the extent to which these phenomena are peculiar to humans, or shared by a broader class of language learners. We vary the age of exposure by training LMs on language pairs in various experimental conditions, and find that LMs, which lack any direct analog to innate maturational stages, do not show CP effects when the age of exposure of L2 is delayed. Our results contradict the claim that CP effects are an inevitable result of statistical learning, and they are consistent with an innate mechanism for CP effects. We show that we can reverse-engineer the CP by introducing a regularizer partway through training to simulate a maturational decrease in plasticity. All in all, our results suggest that L1 learning on its own may not be enough to induce a CP, and additional engineering is necessary to make language models more cognitively plausible.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1162\/tacl_a_00725","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,1,24]],"date-time":"2025-01-24T20:57:21Z","timestamp":1737752241000},"page":"96-120","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/mitpressjournals.corrections.policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":7,"title":["Investigating Critical Period Effects in Language Acquisition through Neural Language Models"],"prefix":"10.1162","volume":"13","author":[{"given":"Ionut","family":"Constantinescu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"ETH Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland. ionut.constantinescu@alumni.ethz.ch"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tiago","family":"Pimentel","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"ETH Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland. tiago.pimentel@inf.ethz.ch"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ryan","family":"Cotterell","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"ETH Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland. ryan.cotterell@inf.ethz.ch"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Alex","family":"Warstadt","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"ETH Z\u00fcrich, Switzerland. awarstadt@ethz.ch"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"281","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,1,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib1","article-title":"Critical learning periods in deep networks","volume-title":"7th International Conference on Learning Representations","author":"Achille","year":"2019"},{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"144","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-01219-9_9","article-title":"Memory aware synapses: Learning what (not) to forget","volume-title":"15th European Conference","author":"Aljundi","year":"2018"},{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib3","article-title":"The second PASCAL recognising textual entailment challenge","author":"Bar-Haim","year":"2006","journal-title":"Proceedings of the Second PASCAL Challenges Workshop on Recognising Textual Entailment"},{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib4","article-title":"The fifth PASCAL recognizing textual entailment challenge","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Second Text Analysis Conference","author":"Bentivogli","year":"2009"},{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib5","volume-title":"Mathematical Statistics: Basic Ideas and Selected Topics","author":"Bickel","year":"2001","edition":"2"},{"key":"2025012714411198200_bib6","unstructured":"Lukas\n              Biewald\n            \n          . 2020. 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