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{
    "pk": 49892,
    "title": "Language experience and prediction across the lifespan: evidence from diachronic fine-tuning of language models",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Humans predict upcoming language input from context, which\ndepends on prior language experience. This suggests that older\nadults' predictions may differ from those of young adults, due\nto longer language exposure. Here we use sentence completion\ndata from two age cohorts (YA = 18-35 y.o.; OA = 50-80\ny.o.) and language models fine-tuned to particular decades of\na diachronic corpus of American English to examine the relationship \nbetween changes in language statistics and differences in \nlinguistic prediction across different age groups. We\nobserved greater consistency in contextual probabilities within\nage groups compared to across age groups, indicating that\nYA and OA make subtly different predictions given identical\ncontext. Next-word prediction performance for the fine-tuned\nmodels decreased as the temporal distance between the fine-\ntuning and testing decade increased, indicating that language\nusage statistics changed over the span of a few decades. Further, \nGPT-2 surprisal values are more predictive of YA than OA\ncontextual probabilities, suggesting that the language statistics,\nas captured by a model trained largely on internet text, aligns\nmore with YA's internal model than OA's. However, both age\ngroups' data are better fit by models fine-tuned on more recent\ncorpus decades.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Linguistics; Language Production; Predictive Processing; Computational Modeling; Corpus studies"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/83b1p2nz",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Alton",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Chao",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Merced",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Ellis",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Cain",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Merced",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Rachel",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Ryskin",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Merced",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49892/galley/37854/download/"
        }
    ]
}