diff --git a/spacy/cli/debug_model.py b/spacy/cli/debug_model.py
index 1d27c7c52..7f8e1dabc 100644
--- a/spacy/cli/debug_model.py
+++ b/spacy/cli/debug_model.py
@@ -128,7 +128,7 @@ def debug_model(
     goldY = None
     for e in range(3):
         if tok2vec:
-            tok2vec.predict(X)
+            tok2vec.update([Example.from_dict(x, {}) for x in X])
         Y, get_dX = model.begin_update(X)
         if goldY is None:
             goldY = _simulate_gold(Y)
diff --git a/spacy/tests/pipeline/test_tok2vec.py b/spacy/tests/pipeline/test_tok2vec.py
index 6041657d3..985314217 100644
--- a/spacy/tests/pipeline/test_tok2vec.py
+++ b/spacy/tests/pipeline/test_tok2vec.py
@@ -184,7 +184,7 @@ def test_tok2vec_listener_callback():
     label_sample = [tagger.model.ops.asarray(gold_array, dtype="float32")]
     tagger.model.initialize(X=docs, Y=label_sample)
     docs = [nlp.make_doc("Another entirely random sentence")]
-    tok2vec.predict(docs)
+    tok2vec.update([Example.from_dict(x, {}) for x in docs])
     Y, get_dX = tagger.model.begin_update(docs)
     # assure that the backprop call works (and doesn't hit a 'None' callback)
     assert get_dX(Y) is not None