Related papers: A Dual-Task Paradigm to Investigate Sentence Compr…
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…
Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…
Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies -- they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading. This study highlights a limitation of…
Large language models (LLMs) that fluently converse with humans are a reality - but do LLMs experience human-like processing difficulties? We systematically compare human and LLM sentence comprehension across seven challenging linguistic…
Language models that are trained on the next-word prediction task have been shown to accurately model human behavior in word prediction and reading speed. In contrast with these findings, we present a scenario in which the performance of…
Auditory attention and selective phase-locking are central to human speech understanding in complex acoustic scenes and cocktail party settings, yet these capabilities in multilingual subjects remain poorly understood. While machine…
Two of the central factors believed to underpin human sentence processing difficulty are expectations and retrieval from working memory. A recent attempt to create a unified cognitive model integrating these two factors relied on the…
Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…
Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a…
Recent claims suggest that large language models (LMs) underperform humans in comprehending minimally complex English statements (Dentella et al., 2024). Here, we revisit those findings and argue that human performance was overestimated,…
Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…
Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…
Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and…
The usual way to interpret language models (LMs) is to test their performance on different benchmarks and subsequently infer their internal processes. In this paper, we present an alternative approach, concentrating on the quality of LM…
Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to…
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…
Assessing the performance of interpreting services is a complex task, given the nuanced nature of spoken language translation, the strategies that interpreters apply, and the diverse expectations of users. The complexity of this task become…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often evaluated against ideals of perfect Bayesian inference, yet growing evidence suggests that their in-context reasoning exhibits systematic forgetting of past information. Rather than viewing this…
Working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind, is a critical component of human intelligence and executive functioning. It is correlated with performance on various cognitive tasks, including measures of…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made significant strides in various natural language processing tasks. However, the lack of interpretability due to their ``black-box'' nature poses challenges for responsible implementation. Although…