@inproceedings{yue-etal-2026-evaluating,
    title = ": Evaluating {LLM}s on Phonological Understanding in {C}hinese",
    author = "Yue, Xing  and
      Shen, Yongliang  and
      Lu, Weiming",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1041/",
    pages = "22723--22768",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Language is a vehicle for thought, intricately tied to sounds, symbols, and meaning. However, most large language model (LLM) research focuses on meaning (semantics) and symbols (spelling) while largely overlooking sounds. Existing benchmarks on LLMs' phonological abilities are either solvable through rote memorization or intertwined with other abilities, making them inadequate to measure LLMs' genuine ability in *phonological understanding*. Here, we present $\texttt{Phun-Bench}$, a purpose-built Chinese benchmark with diverse tasks and settings across three dimensions (Homophony, Rhyme, and Phonetic Similarity), designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' phonological understanding. Our results show that while LLMs excel at recalling correct pronunciations, they generally struggle to leverage phonological knowledge in the flexible and intuitive way that human speakers do. Moreover, through detailed analyses, we propose a hypothesis regarding the underlying mechanism of LLMs' phonological understanding and ``perception'', highlighting an underexplored frontier for future research."
}