Pronunciation issues in Big Sur

For me, Big Sur introduced a dramatic change in VoiceOver pronunciation. Has anyone else experienced either of the following?

• VoiceOver pauses before and after unrecognized and misspelled words, as if those words had commas before and after them. The problem might appear or not appear depending on how you navigate through the text (arrow keys versus VO+A for example). Using the grammar checker to Ignore the problem words eliminates the issue.
• VoiceOver behaves as is punctuation verbosity is set to All for some documents even though it isn't. This behavior depends on the voice. I see it with Alison, but even Alex mishandles the same punctuation, pronouncing the word didn't as didn T for example.

Neither of these issues appeared before Big Sur.

As someone who reviews fiction manuscripts everyday, I can testify that these are significant problems that impact my productivity. I've been emailing Apple accessibility about this, but wondered how widespread these problems are.

Thanks.