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arXiv · 2606.17835

Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

James Kirby·Ioana Krehan·Michele Gubian
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Abstract

This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier outputs between a purely self-supervised pre-trained model and a model fine-tuned for Mandarin ASR. No evidence of compensation was found in the embedding similarities of the purely pre-trained model. Probing classifiers showed some evidence of compensation in addition to the expected layer-wise improvements in categorization, but failed to replicate human performance on isolated test syllables. Our findings contrast with previous reports of sensitivity to phonological structure emerging through pre-training alone, and suggest that supervised objectives may be necessary to encourage the abstraction of at least some types of phonological regularities.

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James Kirby, Ioana Krehan, Michele Gubian. 2026-06-16. Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17835

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