@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-beyond,
    title = "Beyond Binary {A}nimacy: A Multi-Method Investigation of {LM}s' Sensitivity in {E}nglish Object Relative Clauses",
    author = "Li, Yue  and
      Cong, Yan  and
      Francis, Elaine J.",
    editor = "Kuribayashi, Tatsuki  and
      Rambelli, Giulia  and
      Takmaz, Ece  and
      Wicke, Philipp  and
      Li, Jixing  and
      Oh, Byung-Doh",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cmcl-1.23/",
    pages = "184--196",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-227-5",
    abstract = "Animacy is a well-documented factor affecting language production, but its influence on Language Models (LMs) in complex structures like Object Relative Clauses (ORCs) remains underexplored. This study examines LMs' sensitivity to animacy in English ORC structure choice (passive vs. active) using surprisal-based and prompting-based analyses, alongside human baselines. In surprisal-based analysis, DistilGPT-2 best mirrored human preferences, while GPT-Neo and BERT-base showed rigid biases, diverging from human patterns. Prompting-based analysis expanded testing to GPT-4o-mini, Gemini models, and DeepSeek-R1, revealing GPT-4o-mini{'}s stronger human alignment but limited animacy sensitivity in Gemini models and DeepSeek-R1. Some LMs exhibited inconsistencies between analyses, reinforcing that prompting alone is unreliable for assessing linguistic competence. Corpus analysis confirmed that training data alone cannot fully explain animacy sensitivity, suggesting emergent animacy-aware representations. These findings underscore the interaction between training data, model architecture, and linguistic generalization, highlighting the need for integrating structured linguistic knowledge into LMs to enhance their alignment with human sentence processing mechanisms."
}