[2603.20381] The production of meaning in the processing of natural language

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.20381 (cs) [Submitted on 20 Mar 2026] Title:The production of meaning in the processing of natural language Authors:Christopher J. Agostino, Quan Le Thien, Nayan D'Souza, Louis van der Elst View a PDF of the paper titled The production of meaning in the processing of natural language, by Christopher J. Agostino and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing the production of meaning in the processing of natural language is critical for designing safe, thoughtful, engaging, and empowering human-agent interactions. Experiments in cognitive science and social psychology have demonstrated that human semantic processing exhibits contextuality more consistent with quantum logical mechanisms than classical Boolean theories, and recent works have found similar results in large language models -- in particular, clear violations of the Bell inequality in experiments of contextuality during interpretation of ambiguous expressions. We explore the CHSH $|S|$ parameter -- the metric associated with the inequality -- across the inference parameter space of models spanning four orders of magnitude in scale, cross-referencing it with MMLU, hallucination rate, and nonsense detection benchmarks. We find that the interquartile range of the $|S|$ distribution -- the statistic that most sharply differentiates models from one another -- is completely orthogonal to all external ben...