[ If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities? ]
Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” Even large AI language models superficially replicate ordinary speech, researchers want to know if there are specific aspects of human language that simply have no parallels in the communication systems of other animals or artificially intelligent devices.
In the linguistic community, some argue that language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky and two co-authors in 2023, when they wrote that “the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data”. AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they’re not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way.
That view was challenged in a recent paper by some researchers, they put a number of large language models, or LLMs, through a gamut of linguistic tests – including, in one case, having the LLM generalize the rules of a made-up language. While most of the LLMs failed to parse linguistic rules in the way that humans are able to, one had impressive abilities that greatly exceeded expectations. It was able to analyze language in much the same way a graduate student in linguistics would – diagramming sentences, resolving multiple ambiguous meanings, and making use of complicated linguistic features such as recursion. This finding, researchers said, “challenges our understanding of what AI can do”.
One part of the test focused on recursion – the ability to embed phrases within phrases. This process of recursion can go on forever…
Recursion has been called one of the defining characteristics of human language by Chomsky and others – and indeed, perhaps a defining characteristic of the human mind. Linguists have argued that its limitless potential is what gives human languages their ability to generate an infinite number of possible sentences out of a finite vocabulary and a finite set of rules. So far, there’s no convincing evidence that other animals can use recursion in a sophisticated way.
Humans “have a lot of commonsense knowledge that enables us to rule out the ambiguity. But it’s difficult for computers to have that level of commonsense knowledge”. Are some of the characteristics of human language the result of an evolutionary process that is limited to our species?
The recent results show that AI language models can, in principle, do sophisticated linguistic analysis. But no model has yet come up with anything original, nor has it taught us something about language we didn’t know before.
[ Extract, article by Steve Nadis – October 31, 2025 – Quanta M – https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-first-ai-models-analyze-language-as-well-as-a-human-expert-20251031/ ]