Linguistics should not stop worrying about languages other than English: A commentary on Futrell and Mahowald

Abstract

Futrell and Mahowald’s assumptions about parallels between language models and human language are primarily based on LMs’ performance in English. In our commentary, we discuss how this impacts some of their key takeaways and highlight LM shortcomings in languages other than English (specifically, Icelandic), which are only alluded to in the target article.