Conversational Agents and the Understanding of Human Language: Reflections on AI, LLMs, and Cognitive Science

ArXi:2603.27809v1 Announce Type: new In this paper, we discuss the relationship between natural language processing by computers (NLP) and the understanding of the human language capacity, as studied by linguistics and cognitive science. We outline the evolution of NLP from its beginnings until the age of large language models, and highlight for each of its main paradigms some similarities and differences with theories of the human language capacity.