Beyond the limitations of any imaginable mechanism: large language models and psycholinguistics

Large language models are not detailed models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, extremely successful at their primary task: providing a model for language. For this reason and because there are no animal models for language, large language models are important in psycholinguistics: they are useful as a practical tool, as an illustrative comparative, and philosophically, as a basis for recasting the relationship between language and thought. This is a commentaryon Bowers et al. (2022). Neural-network models of language are optimized to solve practical problems such as machine translation.