# Context-borne lexical contagion > Source-anchored research for Context-borne lexical contagion. Run status: COMPLETED. Parent: [Prompt-side control of LLM lexical tics](https://llms-explorer.com/tree/ai-isms-prompt-side-control/) · 4 facets · 5 facts · page: https://llms-explorer.com/tree/context-borne-lexical-contagion/ ## Definitions - Scoping: prompt wording effects on task performance are not simply predicted by word frequency or perplexity, and prompts transfer poorly across datasets and models; a single modal-verb change moved performance up to 17 points in the tested older models (2023, LLaMA/OPT). Do not extrapolate fixed contagion rules from vocabulary frequency. (low confidence) — [source](https://arxiv.org/html/2311.01967) ## Problems, failure modes and limitations - Repetition priming behaves differently in base LLMs, instruct LLMs and humans; instruction tuning appears to shift models toward more controlled processing, so contagion strength cannot be assumed identical across base and tuned models. (low confidence) (verified as of 2026-08-31) — [source](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.14681) ## Comparisons and alternatives - LLMs reliably repeat contextual content faithfully rather than relying only on internal parameters; RepeatLeakage exploits this to extract system prompts from GPT-Store apps and ChatGPT contexts, and the copy-from-context ability cannot be disabled without hurting core capability. (medium confidence) — [source](https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/34832) ## Facts and statements - Anthropic's official prompting guide states that the formatting style used in a prompt may influence Claude's response style, and advises matching prompt style to desired output style; removing markdown from the prompt can reduce markdown in the output. (medium confidence) (verified as of 2026-09-23) — [source](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-prompting-best-practices) - In controlled dative-completion experiments, structurally primed completions show greater lexico-semantic repetition of context, i.e. structural, lexical and semantic alignment reinforce each other during generation (EMNLP 2026 Findings, submitted 2026-09-03). (low confidence) (verified as of 2026-09-03) — [source](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04484)