AI RESEARCH
The Grounding Gap: How LLMs Anchor the Meaning of Abstract Concepts Differently from Humans
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2605.08837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract concepts - justice, theory, availability - have no single perceivable referent; in the human brain, their meaning emerges from a web of experiences, affect, and social context. Do large language models (LLMs) ground abstract concepts in a similar way? We study this by replicating property-generation experiments from cognitive science on 21 frontier and open-weight LLMs.