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HFEPX · Eval paper review

Pseudowords as probes: Large Language Models show little of the sublexical sensitivity that governs human pseudoword processing

Jing Chen, Giulia Loca, Simona Amenta, Marco Marelli

Published

Oct 6, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

15% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Oct 6, 2026

Open arXiv Find implementation Shortlist (0) RSS feed

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Weak or implicit
Validate from full paper
Usefulness for eval research
0/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here

Human Eval Papers LLM-as-Judge Papers Pairwise Preference Papers Tool-Use Evaluation Search

Abstract

Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing. Yet whether LLMs exhibit comparable sensitivity to these cues remains unclear. We tested five LLMs on two Italian two-alternative forced-choice pseudoword experiments and compared their responses with a human behavioural baseline. LLMs aligned more reliably with humans when real-word options provided a lexical familiarity cue than in the pseudoword-only condition, where they fell substantially below fastText, a character-n-gram model. In addition, the sublexical cosine-similarity cue that reliably drove human--fastText agreement did not consistently transfer to human--LLM alignment, and reasoning-token expenditure bore no consistent relation to human processing difficulty. These findings suggest that LLMs do not necessarily share the sublexical cues that govern human pseudoword processing; we discuss tokenization and training-data coverage as candidate explanations.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
General
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
None
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing.
  • Yet whether LLMs exhibit comparable sensitivity to these cues remains unclear.
  • We tested five LLMs on two Italian two-alternative forced-choice pseudoword experiments and compared their responses with a human behavioural baseline.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Agreement / Kappa

Contribution summary

  • Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing.
  • We tested five LLMs on two Italian two-alternative forced-choice pseudoword experiments and compared their responses with a human behavioural baseline.
  • LLMs aligned more reliably with humans when real-word options provided a lexical familiarity cue than in the pseudoword-only condition, where they fell substantially below fastText, a character-n-gram model.

Why it matters for eval

  • Systematicity, the probabilistic mapping of form to meaning, permeates language at all levels, and sublexical cues have been shown to govern human pseudoword processing.
  • We tested five LLMs on two Italian two-alternative forced-choice pseudoword experiments and compared their responses with a human behavioural baseline.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.