You're correct, I'm using the IPA as a proxy for the audio data they actually use, but it's a decent proxy. I'd have linked spectrograms if I could find them,

You're correct, I'm using the IPA as a proxy for the audio data they actually use, but it's a decent proxy. I'd have linked spectrograms if I could find them, but in general sibilants come out very heavily in the audio data, so the complete absence of sibilance in "Trump" alone would make it extremely unlikely that the words would get mixed up. The fact that the words are substantially different in length would also come out in the audio data, as would all of the other features that I mentioned. If you were to create spectrograms for each word they would be completely distinct from each other to even a human eye across multiple dimensions. There's no good reason to claim that phonetics are the reason why their advanced statistical model connected the two words.