Automatic or Controlled? Repetition Priming Reveals Divergent Processing in Base LLMs, Instruct LLMs, and Humans

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior. We apply repetition priming (Shiffrin and Schneider, 1977) to 15 models across five model families (1.5B-14B parameters) in two tasks, semantic categorization and cloze completion, with matched human experiments using identical