Related papers: On the Predictive Power of Neural Language Models …
The impressive linguistic abilities of large language models (LLMs) have recommended them as models of human sentence processing, with some conjecturing a positive 'quality-power' relationship (Wilcox et al., 2023), in which language…
Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the…
Instruction tuning aligns the response of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite such efforts in human--LLM alignment, we find that instruction tuning does not always make LLMs human-like from a cognitive modeling…
It has been argued that humans rapidly adapt their lexical and syntactic expectations to match the statistics of the current linguistic context. We provide further support to this claim by showing that the addition of a simple adaptation…
When we read, we make predictions about upcoming words; these predictions influence our reading behavior. The success of large language models (LLMs), which, like humans, make predictions about upcoming words, has motivated their use as…
Recent psycholinguistic studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times, which has been speculated to be due…
People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…
Recent work has found that contemporary language models such as transformers can become so good at next-word prediction that the probabilities they calculate become worse for predicting reading time. In this paper, we propose that this can…
Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and…
Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to advance state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmark tasks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the degree to which LMs can…
To date, most investigations on surprisal and entropy effects in reading have been conducted on the group level, disregarding individual differences. In this work, we revisit the predictive power of surprisal and entropy measures estimated…
A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…
We analyze if large language models are able to predict patterns of human reading behavior. We compare the performance of language-specific and multilingual pretrained transformer models to predict reading time measures reflecting natural…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language…
Recent cognitive modeling studies have reported that larger language models (LMs) exhibit a poorer fit to human reading behavior (Oh and Schuler, 2023b; Shain et al., 2024; Kuribayashi et al., 2024), leading to claims of their cognitive…
We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…
Current language models are considered to have sub-human capabilities at natural language tasks like question-answering or writing code. However, language models are not trained to perform well at these tasks, they are trained to accurately…
Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have led to the development of highly sophisticated language models for text generation. In parallel, neuroscience has increasingly employed these models to explore cognitive processes…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…