Chesterton, Bo: The Bestiary Has a Mirror: How a Language Model Treats Its Own Nonces vs. Another Model's

_Zenodo_. 2026The Bestiary-Chess corpus (n = 4,500 elicitations) probes how the GPT-5.4 model family responds when prompted to describe phonotactically plausible non-words under a 3 × 3 + 1 ontology grid (real / imaginary / type-of × animal / object / idea, plus neutral). The third subcorpus (BC3) crosses two stimulus sets — 35 GPT-authored nonces and 20 Claude-authored nonces — so we can ask: does GPT confabulate at the same rate when prompted with words it (in some sense) authored, vs. those a