Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: Large language models and human linguistic cognition
Time: Thursday, February 20, 2025: 12:30 – 2pm
Location: 32-461
Abstract: Several recent publications in cognitive science have made the suggestion that the performance of current Large Language Models (LLMs) challenges arguments that linguists use to support their theories (in particular, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus and from cross-linguistic variation). I will review this line of work, starting from proposals that take LLMs themselves to be good theories of human linguistic cognition. I will note that the architectures behind current LLMs lack the distinction between competence and performance and between correctness and probability, two fundamental distinctions of human cognition. Moreover, these architectures fail to acquire key aspects of human linguistic knowledge in fact, they make inductive leaps that are not just non-human-like but would be surprising in any kind of rational learner. These observations make current LLMs inadequate theories of human linguistic cognition. Still, LLMs can in principle inform cognitive science by serving as proxies for theories of cognition whose representations and learning are more linguistically-neutral than those of most theories within generative linguistics. I will illustrate this proxy use of LLMs in evaluating learnability and typological arguments and show that, at present, these models provide little support for linguistically-neutral theories of cognition.