# Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02807 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02807/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05416/) (2018)
- [Trimming Phonetic Alignments Improves the Inference of Sound Correspondence Patterns from Multilingual Wordlists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17932/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Exploring Sound Change Over Time: A Review of Computational and Human Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05092/) (2024)
- [The Cognate Data Bottleneck in Language Phylogenetics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00911/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05262/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not taken this potential into account. Most computational studies still rely on lexical cognates as major data source for phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics, although there do exist a few studies in which authors praise the benefits of comparing words at the level of sound sequences. Building on (a) ten diverse datasets from different language families, and (b) state-of-the-art methods for automated cognate and sound correspondence detection, we test, for the first time, the performance of sound-based versus cognate-based approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction. Our results show that phylogenies reconstructed from lexical cognates are topologically closer, by approximately one third with respect to the generalized quartet distance on average, to the gold standard phylogenies than phylogenies reconstructed from sound correspondences.