“…4 The failure of large language models in acquiring functional linguistic competence 4.1 LLMs are great at pretending to think Large text corpora contain a wealth of non-linguistic information, from mathematical and scientific facts (e.g., "two plus seven is nine") to factual knowledge (e.g., "the capital of Texas is Austin") to harmful stereotypes (e.g., "women belong in the kitchen"). This is not particularly surprising since even simple patterns of co-occurrence between words capture rich conceptual knowledge, including object properties [e.g., Grand et al, 2022, Huebner and Willits, 2018, Unger and Fisher, 2021, Utsumi, 2020, van Paridon et al, 2021, abstract analogies [Ichien et al, 2021], social biases [e.g., Bolukbasi et al, 2016, Caliskan et al, 2017, Lewis and Lupyan, 2020, and expert knowledge in specialized domains [e.g., Tshitoyan et al, 2019]. Moreover, statistical regularities extracted from language and from visual scenes exhibit a substantial degree of correspondence [Roads andLove, 2020, Sorscher et al, 2021], indicating that linguistic information can capture at least some aspects of experiential input [e.g., Abdou et al, 2021, Patel and.…”