Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2607.10162v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sound symbolism, the human tendency to map speech sounds to perceptual qualities such as roundness or sharpness, arises primarily from the acoustics of speech rather than spelling. Whether Speech Language Models (SLMs) share this tendency remains open, as prior evaluations rely on text or images rather than real speech. We study it using genuine human speech recordings, comparing model judgments against human data across the auditory, cro