HOW FAR DO SSL SPEECH MODELS LISTEN FOR TONE? TEMPORAL FOCUS OF TONE REPRESENTATION UNDER LOW-RESOURCE TRANSFER
Lexical tone is central to many languages but remains underexplored in self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models, especially beyond Mandarin. We study four languages with complex and diverse tone systems (Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese) to ask how far such models "listen" for tone and how tra…