Language Models Don’t Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language

Abstract

We argue that language-only models don’t learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test.These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment as a useful conceptual framework to understand how language-only models learn about the world (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of linguistic knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience. Our code and data are available at <github.com/brucewlee/h-test>.