SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Distinct dynamics of conceptual and referential disruptions in human reading and large language model processing

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

Linguistic meaning is grounded in conceptual content, from which reference to particular entities emerges as words enter discourse. To examine the processing dynamics associated with these two dimensions of meaning, we selectively disrupted conceptual or referential information in short narratives and traced the resulting effects in human self-paced reading and in the predictive and representational processing of large language models. In human reading, conceptual disruptions produced a strong but localized processing cost, emerging immediately after the distorted word, reaching an early maxim

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global