The Learning Objective Governs Perceptual Narrowing: A Cross-Lingual, Layer-Wise, Ten-Seed Study of Self-Supervised Speech Encoders
Perceptual narrowing---the developmental loss of non-native phoneme discrimination in the first year of life \citep{werker1984}---is a canonical developmental finding, yet \emph{what learning objective produces it} remains open. We train a \(\sim\)7\,M-parameter Transformer encoder on child-directed and read speech and evaluate phoneme ABX in English, French, and Mandarin over ten seeds, the seed as the unit of replication. Six results. \textbf{(1)}~The objective sets the direction of cross-lingual transfer: reconstruction (masked mel-prediction) degrades non-native discrimination, prediction (frame-contrastive) improves it---a same-encoder, same-data gap of \(+0.051\) in first-layer Mand...
| Authors | Sejin Yoo |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 August 2026 |
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