SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Do Audio Language Models Hear and Read Distinctive Features Alike?

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 24, 2026 · UTC

Audio language models pass speech and text through a single decoder. We ask whether that decoder represents a distinctive feature in the same direction when a phoneme is heard and when it is read. For minimal pairs of phonemes differing in one feature, we take the offset between the two members' mean representations. Averaging those offsets gives a direction for each stream, and we measure the cosine between the two. Because the two streams already agree about arbitrary phoneme pairs, we compare every measure against a reference built from random pairings rather than against zero. We apply thi

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global