Disjoint Processing Mechanisms of Hierarchical and Linear Grammars in Large Language Models

Abstract: All natural languages are structured hierarchically. In humans, this structural restriction is neurologically coded: when two grammars are presented with identical vocabularies, brain areas responsible for language processing are only sensitive to hierarchical grammars. Using LLMs, we investigate whether such functionally distinct hierarchical processing regions can arise solely from exposure to large-scale language distributions. We generate inputs using English, Italian, Japanese, or nonce words, varying the underlying grammars to conform to either hierarchical or linear/positional rules. Using these grammars, we first observe that LLMs show distinct behaviors on hierarchical versus linearly structured inputs. Then, we find that the components responsible for processing hierarchical grammars are distinct from those that process linear grammars; we causally verify this in ablation experiments. Finally, we observe that hierarchy-selective components are also active on nonce grammars; this suggests that hierarchy sensitivity is not tied to meaning, nor in-distribution inputs.