arXiv cs.CL· Rui He, Philipp Homan, Wolfram Hinzen·· 11 小时前AI 评分31
语言边界源于压力受限的处理动态：一项生成模拟、人类听者与 LLM 研究
Linguistic boundaries emerge from pressure-constrained processing dynamics
AI 导读
研究提出语言边界源于维持未解决依存、整合已完成关系与更新语义上下文三种需求的交互，结构完成允许但不决定边界闭合。无预设边界位置的生成模拟复现了类句子的段长分布与特征时间尺度；人类听者在未解决依存更少、整合成本与语义失配更高处更倾向标记边界。用大语言模型处理同一叙事时，句末出现局部内在维度升高、隐藏状态轨迹更直，随后表征更新更大。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:Human cognition organizes continuous experience into bounded units while maintaining continuity across them. Linguistic elements are also organized into bounded structural units such as words and phrases, with sentence marking the final bound of a grammatical construction process. How do such boundaries emerge? We propose boundaries emerge from interacting demands to maintain unresolved dependencies, integrate completed relations, and update semantic context, with structural completion allowing but not determining closure. First, in a generative simulation without predefined boundary positions or constituent labels, these demands produced sentence-like segment-length distributions and distinct characteristic timescales, with structural completion allowing but not determining closure. Near boundaries, unresolved dependency load declined, integration cost peaked, and accumulated pressure reset. Then, we tested whether same demands predicted human listeners' boundary choices during comprehension. Listeners were more likely to mark boundaries with fewer unresolved dependencies, higher integration cost and semantic mismatch, and elevated preceding memory load, beyond syntactic and prosodic cues. Third, in naturalistic self-paced reading, sentence-final slowing coincided with declining memory load and increasing integration cost and semantic mismatch, broadly consistent with the simulation. Processing same narratives with a large language model revealed increased local intrinsic dimensionality and straighter hidden-state trajectories at sentence endings, followed by larger representational updates. Boundary explained additional variation in reading time and hidden-state geometry beyond processing demands, but considerably less in next-token surprisal. Together, these findings suggest linguistic boundaries emerge as discrete manifestations of transitions in continuous processing dynamics.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2611.08085 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2611.08085v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.08085 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Rui He [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 5 Nov 2026 14:33:00 UTC (4,583 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.CL · arxiv.org