The study investigates how disrupting conceptual versus referential information in short narratives affects human reading and large language model (LLM) processing. In humans, conceptual disruptions cause a strong, localized processing cost that peaks early and declines quickly, while referential disruptions produce weaker, gradually decreasing effects that are more influenced by sentence boundaries. In LLMs, both disruptions appear immediately at the manipulated word; surprisal patterns mirror human reading, whereas output-layer representations show that referential disruption initially causes a larger displacement before both types decay following a power-law.
What do a language model's hidden states say about the organization of a single text? From one forward pass, without training, we score every token position on two properties.
The paper argues that language operates with two parameters: amplitude, which measures how often words co‑occur, and phase, a signed relational factor that determines how co‑activated meanings combine and can reverse a meaning’s contribution. Unlike amplitude, phase is not captured by standard word embeddings or transformer attention weights and is indexed to individuals and dyadic interactions. The authors propose six empirical predictions to test phase’s role and suggest that future language models should incorporate agent‑indexed, phase‑bearing semantic states.
arXiv:2603. 00270v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models can process millions of tokens, yet how they handle conflicting information within context remains poorly understood.
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
arXiv:2608.22452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surprisal, the negative log-probability a language model assigns to a word given its preceding context, reliably predicts adult reading times. Does it...
arXiv:2606. 07555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways.
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:2408.11827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how language models compose meaning from linguistic input remains a central problem in interpretability research. Mechanistic studies...
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...
arXiv:2607. 21498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen {\guillemotleft}This is not a course.
The paper investigates how periodic subject changes—termed interruptions—affect the perceived novelty and coherence of text generated by base language models. By inserting a new subject every few hundred tokens into a stream that otherwise repeats, the authors find that judged surprise increases by 1.2 to 1.4 points and connection by 0.8 points compared to habituation alone. The study also reports that such interruptions do not produce integrated documents, and that the effect is robust across different models and evaluation protocols.
arXiv:2608. 04021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits.