@inproceedings{mccurdy-etal-2025-two,
    title = "Two ways into the hall of mirrors: Language exposure and lossy memory drive cross-linguistic grammaticality illusions in language models",
    author = "McCurdy, Kate  and
      Christian, Katharina  and
      Seyfried, Amelie  and
      Sonkin, Mikhail",
    editor = "Charpentier, Lucas  and
      Choshen, Leshem  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Gul, Mustafa Omer  and
      Hu, Michael Y.  and
      Liu, Jing  and
      Jumelet, Jaap  and
      Linzen, Tal  and
      Mueller, Aaron  and
      Ross, Candace  and
      Shah, Raj Sanjay  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Wilcox, Ethan Gotlieb  and
      Williams, Adina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First BabyLM Workshop",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.babylm-main.17/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.babylm-main.17",
    pages = "226--236",
    ISBN = "TODO",
    abstract = "Readers of English {---} but not Dutch or German {---} consistently show a grammaticality illusion: they find ungrammatical double-center-embedded sentences easier to process than corresponding grammatical sentences. If pre-trained language model (LM) surprisal mimics these cross-linguistic patterns, this implies that language statistics explain the effect; if, however, the illusion requires memory constraints such as lossy context surprisal (LCS), this suggests a critical role for memory. We evaluate LMs in Dutch, German, and English. We find that both factors influence LMs' susceptibility to grammaticality illusions, and neither fully account for human-like processing patterns."
}