Text is not the important thing here at all. audio language models exist, they are relatively trivial to engineer and they will model audio just as well vs they'll model text or any arbitrary sequence to sequence data.

https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiolm/examples/

Linguistics is useful fiction. It doesn't accurately describe the complexity of language anymore than Newton's laws accurately describe gravity. You'd think people would understand that now with symbolic approaches failing this sort of stuff after decades of trying but i guess not. We don't know how we work. We really really don't.

The obsession with how we think we work over methods that are actually working is really something to behold.