Before the Word Arrives: How LLMs Use Sound to Choose a or an
TL;DR for operators Choosing between a and an depends on how the next word sounds, even when spelling misleads: a university but an hour. Kim and Lee find that a single sound-related direction learned from ordinary English cases generalizes to these spelling-sound exceptions, reaching 100.0% accuracy for Llama, 95.1% for Qwen, and 98.0% for Gemma.1 More importantly, this feature is not merely decodable. When researchers hold a synthetic nonce embedding fixed and change only its position along that direction, the models shift between preferring a and an. ...