Explain the performance gap between LLMs and humans in interpreting Jabberwockified English
Determine the principal factors that best explain why large language models outperform human readers at recovering meaning from Jabberwockified English, specifically whether the advantage arises from LLMs learning more complex or abstract morphosyntactic patterns due to vastly greater training exposure, or from more effective use of largely similar patterns learned by both humans and LLMs.
References
We do not yet know what best explains this difference in ability.
— The unreasonable effectiveness of pattern matching
(2601.11432 - Lupyan et al., 16 Jan 2026) in Section 3: Language as a set of patterns; near the discussion of human costs and limits in reading scrambled or degraded text