The study investigates whether speakers of different languages organize concepts similarly, a core question of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Using word embeddings from two multilingual models, the authors compared relations among 196 basic concepts across 81 languages and found that cross‑language correspondence is stronger for sociocultural meanings than for nature and motion. They also observed that relational differences within the sociocultural domain grow with geographic separation, indicating that universality and relativity are intertwined across conceptual domains.
Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as communication devices because they compress rich experiential variation into shared conventions, potentially obscuring hidden individual and cultural differences in how concepts are mentally represented.
arXiv:2606. 14347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities, however, their internal representations are difficult to interpret.
arXiv:2610.14476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Comparing large language models can reveal shared representational structure and systematic differences between them. However, aggregate similarity m...
arXiv:2608.28924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linguistic theory has long recognized cross-linguistic syntactic regularities, leading to claims that these similar structures are processed by similar...
arXiv:2607. 06544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes inroads into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, there is significant interest in studying how AI impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of this civilization.
arXiv:2608. 03507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Historical language change affects morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, yet computational studies typically examine these levels with incompatible representations and therefore cannot determine whether they evolve together across languages.
The paper investigates how semantic meaning is arranged locally within large language models. By using two controlled probes—one cross‑lingual and one refinement probe—on four decoder‑only LLMs, it finds that after removing dominant variance directions, sentence pairs rank by semantic relatedness, semantic factors cluster around an invariant core with structured variation, refinement tightens neighborhoods, and sentence‑level versus token‑local readouts reveal complementary geometric patterns. These results suggest that LLM semantics form local anisotropic neighborhoods that contract when meaning is refined.
arXiv:2606.11009v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to adapt math word problems for personalized learning at scale, but it remains an open question whether...
arXiv:2608.22411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social interaction increasingly takes place in multicultural settings, where individuals may draw on multiple cultural influences and adapt their commu...
The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing.
arXiv:2511. 00206v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognitive science faces ongoing challenges in research integration, formalization, conceptual clarity, and other areas, in part due to its multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature.
arXiv:2607. 09576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an interpretable network-based framework for representing idiomatic and figurative meaning across eight typologically diverse languages, totaling 160 conventional expressions, the large majority of which are idiomatic.