@inproceedings{lundqvist-etal-2026-large,
    title = "Do large language models and humans follow similar learning stages? Assessing {GPT}-2{'}s order of {S}wedish grammar acquisition within the Processability Theory framework",
    author = "Lundqvist, Stella  and
      Kurfali, Murathan  and
      Sjons, Johan",
    editor = "Ma, Martin Ziqiao  and
      Liu, Emmy  and
      Liu, Jing  and
      Chang, Tyler A.  and
      Fourtassi, Abdellah  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Hahn, Michael  and
      Sun, Weiwei  and
      Shi, Freda",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics ({CDL})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Grand Hyatt Manchester San Diego, 1 Market Pl, San Diego, CA 92101",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.cdl-1.10/",
    pages = "52--76",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-428-6",
    abstract = "We investigate whether GPT-2 acquires Swedish grammatical structures in the same implicational order as for human second language (L2) learners, as predicted by Processability Theory (PT). We present SwePT {--} a minimal pair dataset targeting Swedish syntactic and morphological structures that are acquired by human L2 learners on four separate stages of language development {--} and evaluate the GPT-2 models on SwePT using an acceptability classification task throughout fine-tuning with different input orders in regards to the grammatical structures identified in the data. We find that the observed acquisition orders correlate across the fine-tuned models, while violating the implicational order sequence as hypothesized by PT. The observed relation between performance on the classification task and frequency distributions of the contrasting features in the minimal pairs suggests that the acquisition order can be explained by unigram and n-gram heuristics. While the adaptation of NLP methodologies into the PT framework requires further conceptual and methodological refinement, we do not find evidence for PT-like grammatical development in our experiments."
}