Iconicity in Large Language Models
Lexical iconicity, a direct relation between a word's meaning and its form, is an important aspect of every natural language, most commonly manifesting through sound-meaning associations. Since Large language models' (LLMs') access to both meaning and sound of text is only mediated (meaning through textual context, sound through written representation, further complicated by tokenization), we might expect that the encoding of iconicity in LLMs would be either insufficient or significantly different from human processing. This study addresses this hypothesis by having GPT-4 generate highly iconic pseudowords in artificial languages. To verify that these words actually carry iconicity, we had their meanings guessed by Czech and German participants (n=672) and subsequently by LLM-based participants (generated by GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet). The results revealed that humans can guess the meanings of pseudowords in the generated iconic language more accurately than words in distant natural languages and that LLM-based participants are even more successful than humans in this task. This core finding is accompanied by several additional analyses concerning the universality of the generated language and the cues that both human and LLM-based participants utilize.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Visual Iconicity Challenge: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Sign Language Form-Meaning Mapping
Iconicity, the resemblance between linguistic form and meaning, is pervasive in signed languages, offering a natural testbed for visual grounding. For vision-language models (VLMs), the challenge is to recover such essen…
Visual GroundingWhat makes an Image Iconic? A Fine-Grained Case Study
A natural approach to teaching a visual concept, e.g. a bird species, is to show relevant images. However, not all relevant images represent a concept equally well. In other words, they are not necessarily iconic. This o…
IPSL: A Database of Iconicity Patterns in Sign Languages. Creation and Use
Questioning Arbitrariness in Language: a Data-Driven Study of Conventional Iconicity
Quantifying Phonosemantic Iconicity Distributionally in 6 Languages
Language is, as commonly theorized, largely arbitrary. Yet, systematic relationships between phonetics and semantics have been observed in many specific cases. To what degree could those systematic relationships manifest…
Semantic Similarity