How does visual information included in training affect language processing in audio- and text-based deep learning models?
We explore how such visual grounding affects model-internal representations of words, and find substantially different effects
in speech-vs. text-based language encoders. Firstly, global representational comparisons reveal that visual grounding increases
alignment between representations of spoken and written language, but this effect seems mainly driven by enhanced encoding
of word identity rather than meaning. We then apply targeted clustering analyses to probe for phonetic vs. semantic discriminability
in model representations. Speech-based representations remain phonetically dominated with visual grounding, but in contrast
to text-based representations, visual grounding does not improve semantic discriminability. Our findings could usefully inform
the development of more efficient methods to enrich speech-based models with visually-informed semantics.