T Kinnunen

Ailín Pollio San Pedro, Tomi Kinnunen, Alexandre Nikolaev et al.

SSL speech models capture rich phonetic, prosodic, and acoustic patterns from raw audio, yet how they encode articulatory information across diverse languages remains unclear. Using EMA data from bilingual Finnish-Russian speakers, we evaluate cross-lingual correlations between SSL latent representations and articulatory movements. Models achieve strong prediction performance (Pearson r up to 0.68) even with approximately 5 minutes of training data, with multilingual models outperforming monolingual ones. Intermediate layers encode articulatory features most effectively, and tongue movements are more predictable than lip movements. We also assess the impact of task type (read versus spontaneous speech) and language proficiency, finding higher accuracy for structured tasks and strong generalization across proficiency levels. These results enhance the interpretability of SSL models and show their potential for speech-technology applications.

Lelia Erscoi, Tomi Kinnunen

Automatic deepfake detection has received considerable research attention, yet the socio-technical environment in which humans actually encounter synthetic speech remains poorly understood. We investigate voice deepfake detection as a perceptual and contextual process, presenting a localization task in which 47 participants marked suspected synthetic segments across authentic, fully synthetic, and partially synthetic utterances under three manipulated trust cues: instructional framing, affective priming, and provenance labeling. Participants provided quality ratings on mechanicalness, expressiveness, intelligibility, clarity, calmness, and confidence of evaluation. Utterance class was the primary determinant of detection accuracy and perceptual quality; trust cues produced no main effects but motivated detection behavior. Fully synthetic speech was detected at below-chance levels. Quality ratings tracked utterance type, indicating implicit discrimination where overt detection failed.