The paper studies how large language models (LLMs) handle the discourse particles "just" and "only" in natural conversation. Behavioral experiments show that both humans and LLMs prefer these particles and are more sensitive to "just" than "only", while instruction tuning enhances this sensitivity. Mechanistic analysis identifies specific units in the models that respond to each particle, revealing an asymmetric overlap in their internal representations.
arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.
The asymmetry between language production and perception has been well-documented in psycholinguistics. Whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a functionally analogous distinction remains an open question, particularly given that LLMs rely on the same underlying mechanism (next-token prediction) for both input and output processing.
arXiv:2605.30913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in conversational settings where user phrasing ranges from polite to casual to toxic,...
arXiv:2610.28066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual evaluations often score a model's opening yes or no, a token that also carries model and language answering conventions. We ask when dif...
arXiv:2601. 00181v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns.
arXiv:2502.10577v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Instruct-based large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and even amplify gender bias when prompted with contextually constra...
arXiv:2603.18007v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The study explores whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities -- specifically, the ability to inf...
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) accept or reject generic statements, drawing on psycholinguistic research that identifies factors beyond mere property frequency, such as distinctiveness and characteristicness. Using twelve LLMs evaluated on a psycholinguistic dataset and real-world generics, the study finds that models weigh property commonality against distinctiveness similarly to humans, but they prioritize factual truth and largely ignore striking properties. Manipulating hidden states along factor directions confirms that each factor influences judgments as predicted.
The paper investigates why AI-generated text has become harder to understand, focusing on psycholinguistic features linked to human processing difficulty such as object relative clauses, long syntactic dependencies, and low-frequency n-grams. Using a new corpus of AI-generated text from diverse domains, the study finds that frontier and near-frontier language models employ these difficult features more frequently than paraphrases from round-trip translation and human writing, including more inanimate subjects with animate verbs, longer dependencies, stacked nouns, and reduced object relatives. The authors hypothesize that AI models prioritize information density for tasks like math, code, and reasoning, diverging from human communication goals, and demonstrate this by fine‑tuning a model with a length penalty, which reduces human‑like linguistic behavior.
arXiv:2608.29803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as proxies for human participants in social simulations, yet whether they update their beliefs...
arXiv:2606. 08076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored.
arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.