Non-native speakers of English or ChatGPT: Who thinks better?
This work addresses the gap in understanding AI vs. human cognitive performance in language processing, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific linguistic task.
The study compared non-native English speakers and ChatGPT on processing center-embedding sentences, finding that humans significantly outperform ChatGPT, with evidence showing ChatGPT cannot match human language abilities.
This study sets out to answer one major question: Who thinks better, non-native speakers of English or ChatGPT?, providing evidence from processing and interpreting center-embedding English constructions that human brain surpasses ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT cannot be regarded as a theory of language. Fifteen non-native speakers of English were recruited as participants of the study. A center-embedding English sentence was presented to both the study participants and ChatGPT. The study findings unveil that human brain is still far ahead of Large Language Models, specifically ChatGPT, even in the case of non-native speakers of an L2, here English. The study concludes that human brain's ability to process and interpret natural language data is unique and that ChatGPT still lags behind this human unique ability.