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Disentangling Statistical Preemption from Entrenchment in Language Models' Avoidance of Overgeneralization

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 1, 2026 · UTC

How do learners avoid overgeneralizations such as Tom laughed me without explicit negative evidence? Constructionists have posited two proposals that describe indirect negative evidence against overgeneralizations: preemption (which privileges exposure to near-synonymous construction---e.g., she made him laugh) vs. entrenchment (all exposures to a verb's grammatical usages, including cases like He laughed). We disentangle these hypotheses by running controlled rearing experiments on LMs trained on child-caregiver conversations, where we systematically remove preemptive vs. non-preemptive evide

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