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Cuskley C, Woods R, Flaherty M. The Limitations of Large Language Models for Understanding Human Language and Cognition. Open Mind (Camb) 2024; 8:1058-1083. [PMID: 39229609 PMCID: PMC11370970 DOI: 10.1162/opmi_a_00160] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/25/2023] [Accepted: 07/19/2024] [Indexed: 09/05/2024] Open
Abstract
Researchers have recently argued that the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide new insights into longstanding debates about the role of learning and/or innateness in the development and evolution of human language. Here, we argue on two grounds that LLMs alone tell us very little about human language and cognition in terms of acquisition and evolution. First, any similarities between human language and the output of LLMs are purely functional. Borrowing the "four questions" framework from ethology, we argue that what LLMs do is superficially similar, but how they do it is not. In contrast to the rich multimodal data humans leverage in interactive language learning, LLMs rely on immersive exposure to vastly greater quantities of unimodal text data, with recent multimodal efforts built upon mappings between images and text. Second, turning to functional similarities between human language and LLM output, we show that human linguistic behavior is much broader. LLMs were designed to imitate the very specific behavior of human writing; while they do this impressively, the underlying mechanisms of these models limit their capacities for meaning and naturalistic interaction, and their potential for dealing with the diversity in human language. We conclude by emphasising that LLMs are not theories of language, but tools that may be used to study language, and that can only be effectively applied with specific hypotheses to motivate research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Christine Cuskley
- Language Evolution, Acquisition and Development Group, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
| | - Rebecca Woods
- Language Evolution, Acquisition and Development Group, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
| | - Molly Flaherty
- Department of Psychology, Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA
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Bauer A, Kuder A, Schulder M, Schepens J. Phonetic differences between affirmative and feedback head nods in German Sign Language (DGS): A pose estimation study. PLoS One 2024; 19:e0304040. [PMID: 38814896 PMCID: PMC11139280 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304040] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/02/2024] [Accepted: 05/04/2024] [Indexed: 06/01/2024] Open
Abstract
This study investigates head nods in natural dyadic German Sign Language (DGS) interaction, with the aim of finding whether head nods serving different functions vary in their phonetic characteristics. Earlier research on spoken and sign language interaction has revealed that head nods vary in the form of the movement. However, most claims about the phonetic properties of head nods have been based on manual annotation without reference to naturalistic text types and the head nods produced by the addressee have been largely ignored. There is a lack of detailed information about the phonetic properties of the addressee's head nods and their interaction with manual cues in DGS as well as in other sign languages, and the existence of a form-function relationship of head nods remains uncertain. We hypothesize that head nods functioning in the context of affirmation differ from those signaling feedback in their form and the co-occurrence with manual items. To test the hypothesis, we apply OpenPose, a computer vision toolkit, to extract head nod measurements from video recordings and examine head nods in terms of their duration, amplitude and velocity. We describe the basic phonetic properties of head nods in DGS and their interaction with manual items in naturalistic corpus data. Our results show that phonetic properties of affirmative nods differ from those of feedback nods. Feedback nods appear to be on average slower in production and smaller in amplitude than affirmation nods, and they are commonly produced without a co-occurring manual element. We attribute the variations in phonetic properties to the distinct roles these cues fulfill in turn-taking system. This research underlines the importance of non-manual cues in shaping the turn-taking system of sign languages, establishing the links between such research fields as sign language linguistics, conversational analysis, quantitative linguistics and computer vision.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anastasia Bauer
- Department of Linguistics, General Linguistics, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
| | - Anna Kuder
- Department of Linguistics, General Linguistics, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
| | - Marc Schulder
- Institute for German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
| | - Job Schepens
- Department of Linguistics, General Linguistics, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
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Miao GQ, Dale R, Galati A. (Mis)align: a simple dynamic framework for modeling interpersonal coordination. Sci Rep 2023; 13:18325. [PMID: 37884542 PMCID: PMC10603172 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-41516-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/14/2022] [Accepted: 08/28/2023] [Indexed: 10/28/2023] Open
Abstract
As people coordinate in daily interactions, they engage in different patterns of behavior to achieve successful outcomes. This includes both synchrony-the temporal coordination of the same behaviors at the same time-and complementarity-the coordination of the same or different behaviors that may occur at different relative times. Using computational methods, we develop a simple framework to describe the interpersonal dynamics of behavioral synchrony and complementarity over time, and explore their task-dependence. A key feature of this framework is the inclusion of a task context that mediates interactions, and consists of active, inactive, and inhibitory constraints on communication. Initial simulation results show that these task constraints can be a robust predictor of simulated agents' behaviors over time. We also show that the framework can reproduce some general patterns observed in human interaction data. We describe preliminary theoretical implications from these results, and relate them to broader proposals of synergistic self-organization in communication.
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Affiliation(s)
- Grace Qiyuan Miao
- Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
| | - Rick Dale
- Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Alexia Galati
- Department of Psychological Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, USA
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Eijk L, Rasenberg M, Arnese F, Blokpoel M, Dingemanse M, Doeller CF, Ernestus M, Holler J, Milivojevic B, Özyürek A, Pouw W, van Rooij I, Schriefers H, Toni I, Trujillo J, Bögels S. The CABB dataset: A multimodal corpus of communicative interactions for behavioural and neural analyses. Neuroimage 2022; 264:119734. [PMID: 36343884 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119734] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/19/2022] [Revised: 10/07/2022] [Accepted: 11/03/2022] [Indexed: 11/06/2022] Open
Abstract
We present a dataset of behavioural and fMRI observations acquired in the context of humans involved in multimodal referential communication. The dataset contains audio/video and motion-tracking recordings of face-to-face, task-based communicative interactions in Dutch, as well as behavioural and neural correlates of participants' representations of dialogue referents. Seventy-one pairs of unacquainted participants performed two interleaved interactional tasks in which they described and located 16 novel geometrical objects (i.e., Fribbles) yielding spontaneous interactions of about one hour. We share high-quality video (from three cameras), audio (from head-mounted microphones), and motion-tracking (Kinect) data, as well as speech transcripts of the interactions. Before and after engaging in the face-to-face communicative interactions, participants' individual representations of the 16 Fribbles were estimated. Behaviourally, participants provided a written description (one to three words) for each Fribble and positioned them along 29 independent conceptual dimensions (e.g., rounded, human, audible). Neurally, fMRI signal evoked by each Fribble was measured during a one-back working-memory task. To enable functional hyperalignment across participants, the dataset also includes fMRI measurements obtained during visual presentation of eight animated movies (35 min total). We present analyses for the various types of data demonstrating their quality and consistency with earlier research. Besides high-resolution multimodal interactional data, this dataset includes different correlates of communicative referents, obtained before and after face-to-face dialogue, allowing for novel investigations into the relation between communicative behaviours and the representational space shared by communicators. This unique combination of data can be used for research in neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and beyond.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lotte Eijk
- Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Marlou Rasenberg
- Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Flavia Arnese
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - Mark Blokpoel
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - Mark Dingemanse
- Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Christian F Doeller
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Neural Computation, The Egil and Pauline Braathen and Fred Kavli Centre for Cortical Microcircuits, Jebsen Centre for Alzheimer's Disease, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway; Wilhelm Wundt Institute of Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
| | - Mirjam Ernestus
- Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Judith Holler
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Branka Milivojevic
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - Asli Özyürek
- Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - Wim Pouw
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Iris van Rooij
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands; Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Semiotics, and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark
| | - Herbert Schriefers
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - Ivan Toni
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands
| | - James Trujillo
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Sara Bögels
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O.Box 9010, Nijmegen, Gelderland 6500, the Netherlands; Department of Cognition and Communication, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
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