4 articles
Children spend years learning that language rarely means what it literally says. LLMs can generate grammatically perfect sentences — but whether they understand what those sentences actually do in conversation is a different, harder question.
Russian speakers distinguish blues faster than English speakers do — because Russian draws a categorical boundary English doesn't. LLMs are trained on language too. But what gets shaped, and what doesn't, reveals a surprising asymmetry.
Bilingual children develop metalinguistic superpowers by navigating two languages. AI systems can "speak" hundreds — and understand none the way humans do. The question isn't just neuroscience. It's about whose languages we're choosing to build into our systems, and what we're telling children when we don't.
Stories aren't just how humans communicate — they're how we think. Language models can predict your brain's response to a sentence. They still can't tell a story. Here's why the gap is wider than it looks.
