CULTURAL ENTITY–PRACTICE COUPLING ACROSS CONTEXTS AND MODELS

Cultural knowledge involves relations between entities and practices under particular social and situational conditions. We introduce Cultural Entity–Practice Coupling, an evidence-grounded framework for characterizing language models’ cultural relational competence through three connected dimensions: bidirectional relational retrieval, representational readability, and behavioral modifiability. Using 2,184 cultural records associated with six countries, we construct paired retrieval tasks with culturally grounded distractors and answer-position controls. Most evaluated models retrieve the supported relations in both directions, with variation across cultural contexts and presentation conditions. Contextconditioned entity and practice states support partial additive reconstruction of answer-anchor representations, and cross-template correspondence readout reveals transferable pairing information. Cue-conditioned residual interventions improve aggregate accuracy by 3.20 to 7.76 percentage points across three models and increase mean gold-answer margins in the four-choice analysis. Comparisons with matched controls characterize model- and direction-dependent intervention selectivity. Together, these findings establish complementary evidence for the retrieval, readability, and behavioral modifiability of cultural relations. The framework provides a structured way to characterize cultural relation knowledge beyond aggregate QA accuracy.