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Where Should Language Sit in a Multimodal Model? Lessons from What Language Does to Human Perception and Cognition

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 7, 2026 · UTC

Language models compute over tokens: language is their input, their output, and increasingly their internal representation. Whether language should keep all of these positions depends on what language does to the system that uses it. The one system with a century of data on that question is the human. We review what language does to human perception, the brain, and thought, and read the same evidence against multimodal models and language models. Throughout, we treat language as a compressor that runs on a shared codebook: a word is an index, the content is in the receiver, and a community mai

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