Paper ID: 2303.00077

Beyond the limitations of any imaginable mechanism: large language models and psycholinguistics

Conor Houghton, Nina Kazanina, Priyanka Sukumaran

Large language models are not detailed models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, extremely successful at their primary task: providing a model for language. For this reason and because there are no animal models for language, large language models are important in psycholinguistics: they are useful as a practical tool, as an illustrative comparative, and philosophically, as a basis for recasting the relationship between language and thought.

Submitted: Feb 28, 2023