Evidence map›Paper›PMID 39543236›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2024

Testing AI on language comprehension tasks reveals insensitivity to underlying meaning.

Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther, Elliot Murphy, Gary Marcus, Evelina Leivada

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
20citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

20 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Review
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  5. A Suite of LMs Comprehend Puzzle Statements as Well or Better Than Humans.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026
    Article
  6. Article
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  9. Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  10. Article
  11. Comparison of Large Language Model with Aphasia.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025
    Article
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  14. Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Vittoria DentellaUniversitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain. vittoria.dentella@unipv.it.
Fritz GüntherHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Elliot MurphyUTHealth, Houston, TX, USA.
Gary MarcusNew York University, New York, USA.
Evelina LeivadaAutonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

Funding

Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) CNS2023-144415
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are recruited in applications that span from clinical assistance and legal support to question answering and education. Their success in specialized tasks has led to the claim that they possess human-like linguistic capabilities related to compositional understanding and reasoning. Yet, reverse-engineering is bound by Moravec's Paradox, according to which easy skills are hard. We systematically assess 7 state-of-the-art models on a novel benchmark. Models answered a series of comprehension questions, each prompted multiple times in two settings, permitting one-word or open-length replies. Each question targets a short text featuring high-frequency linguistic constructions. To establish a baseline for achieving human-like performance, we tested 400 humans on the same prompts. Based on a dataset of n = 26,680 datapoints, we discovered that LLMs perform at chance accuracy and waver considerably in their answers. Quantitatively, the tested models are outperformed by humans, and qualitatively their answers showcase distinctly non-human errors in language understanding. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that, despite their usefulness in various tasks, current AI models fall short of understanding language in a way that matches humans, and we argue that this may be due to their lack of a compositional operator for regulating grammatical and semantic information.

Indexed as

ComprehensionLanguageArtificial IntelligenceFemaleHumansLinguisticsSemantics

Identifiers

PMID39543236
PMCPMC11564762

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.