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arXiv · 2508.02527

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Rhyme: Uncovering Internal Phonetic Representations in LLaMA 3.2

Oliver McLaughlin·Arjun Khurana·Jack Merullo
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Abstract

Large language models demonstrate proficiency on phonetic tasks, such as rhyming, without explicit phonetic or auditory grounding. In this work, we investigate how \verb|Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct| represents token-level phonetic information. Our results suggest that Llama uses a rich internal model of phonemes to complete phonetic tasks. We provide evidence for high-level organization of phoneme representations in its latent space. In doing so, we also identify a ``phoneme mover head" which promotes phonetic information during rhyming tasks. We visualize the output space of this head and find that, while notable differences exist, Llama learns a model of vowels similar to the standard IPA vowel chart for humans, despite receiving no direct supervision to do so.

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Oliver McLaughlin, Arjun Khurana, Jack Merullo. 2025-10-15. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Rhyme: Uncovering Internal Phonetic Representations in LLaMA 3.2. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02527

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