Textless self-supervised speech models have grown in capabilities in recent years, but the nature of the linguistic information they encode has not yet been thoroughly examined. We evaluate the extent to which these models' learned representations align with basic representational distinctions made by humans, focusing on a set of phonetic (low-level) and phonemic (more abstract) contrasts instantiated in word-initial stops. We find that robust representations of both phonetic and phonemic distinctions emerge in early layers of these models' architectures, and are preserved in the principal components of deeper layer representations. Our analyses suggest two sources for this success: some can only be explained by the optimization of the models on speech data, while some can be attributed to these models' high-dimensional architectures. Our findings show that speech-trained HuBERT derives a low-noise and low-dimensional subspace corresponding to abstract phonological distinctions.

本文评估了自我监督语音模型的学习表示与人类语音的差异，结果表明这些模型在语音数据的优化和高维架构的帮助下成功地捕捉了语音的基本音素和音位特征，尤其是 speech-trained HuBERT 模型实现了抽象音位差异的低噪声和低维子空间。

自监督语音模型探测音素和音位信息：以送气现象为案例研究