Structured Phonological Representations for Audio-Articulatory rtMRI Speech Classification

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09767v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:58:07 GMT
• Title: Structured Phonological Representations for Audio-Articulatory rtMRI Speech Classification
• Abstract summary: Real-time MRI makes it possible to observe vocal-tract articulation during speech, but mapping these articulatory patterns to phonetic and phonological categories remains challenging.<n>We investigate whether PhonoQ, an audio-based model trained to recognize structured phonological features, provides useful information for audio--articulatory modeling.
• Score: 9.697606604686817
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Real-time MRI makes it possible to observe vocal-tract articulation during speech, but mapping these articulatory patterns to phonetic and phonological categories remains challenging. We investigate whether PhonoQ, an audio-based model trained to recognize structured phonological features, provides useful information for audio--articulatory modeling. Specifically, we extract representations from PhonoQ's Conformer module, whose training is shaped by supervision for manner, place, voicing, and vowel features. Using articulatory contours with synchronized audio-derived features, we compare WavLM-large and HuBERT-large baselines with models that incorporate PhonoQ-derived representations. Across unseen-speech and unseen-subject settings, these features improve macro-F1 for phonological targets including manner, place, voicing, vowel height, and vowel backness, and also improve fine-grained 39-phoneme classification. In a contour-only inference setting, audio-derived teacher supervision yields modest but consistent gains over contour-only training, indicating that phonological information from synchronized audio can be partially transferred to articulatory models. Finally, posterior analyses show interpretable surface-sensitive patterns consistent with flapping-like /t/ realizations, /t/-/r/ retraction or affrication, and nasal place assimilation.

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