Why Do LLMs Accept Generics? Explaining Acceptability using Psycholinguistic and Model-Derived Factors
Psycholinguistic studies explore why humans accept some generic statements but reject others by showing that these judgments depend on more than how common a property is. People consider several other factors such as how well it sets the kind apart from others or whether it is characteristic of the kind. Inspired by the linguistic and cognitive literature, we explore to what extent factors from these studies explain how large language models (LLMs) judge generics. Our results with twelve models on a psycholinguistic dataset and on naturally occurring generics show that models weigh how common a property is against how well it distinguishes the kind, and combine the two much as people do, ...
| Authors | Mervat Abassy, Zhaoxin Feng, Tatsuki Kuribayashi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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