Ideophones – imitative words using the stream of speech to simulate/depict the rise and fall of sensory perceptions and emotions and temporal experiences of completiveness, instantaneousness, and repetitiveness – have been characterized as semantically empty and context-dependent. The research reported here tested a simple schematic for the semantic categories of Pastaza Kichwa ideophones by tracking neurological responses to ideophones categorized as VISUAL, MOTION, and SOUND. Seventeen native speakers of Pastaza Kichwa listened to audio clips of ideophones extracted from sentential contexts. Subjects’ neural activity was assessed using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results demonstrate that these posited semantic categories activate areas of the brain associated with visualization, motion, and sound processing and production, respectively. This suggests that these ideophones convey semantic information related to these concepts, independent of context. This contrasts with what would be expected by theories suggesting that ideophones on their own are semantically empty. The data give rise to questions regarding whether any language contains only sound ideophones that do not carry additional sensory information and whether ideophones in previous studies treated strictly as sound ideophones might require greater specification of their semantics, specifically from a multisensorial perspective.

Silent pauses are a natural part of speech production and have consequences for speech perception. However, studies have shown mixed results regarding whether listeners process pauses in native and non-native speech similarly or differently. A possible explanation for these mixed results is that perceptual consequences of pauses differ depending on the type of processing that listeners engage in: a focus on the content/meaning of the speech versus style/form of the speech. Thus, the present study examines the effect of silent pauses of listeners’ perception of native and non-native speech in two different tasks: the perceived credibility and the perceived fluency of the speech. Specifically, we ask whether characteristics of silent pauses influence listeners’ perception differently for native versus non-native speech, and whether this pattern differs when listeners are rating the credibility versus the fluency of the speech. We find that while native speakers are rated as more fluent than non-native speakers, there is no evidence that native speakers are rated as more credible. Our findings suggest that the way a non-native accent and disfluency together impact speech perception differs depending on the type of processing that listeners are engaged in when listening to the speech.

The present study investigates the interplay between proficiency and empathy in the development of second language (L2) prosody by analyzing the perception and processing of intonation in questions and statements in L2 Spanish. A total of 225 adult L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) from the Northeastern United States completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task in which they listened to four utterance types and categorized them as either questions or statements. We used Bayesian multilevel regression and drift diffusion modeling to analyze the 2AFC data as a function of proficiency level and empathy scores for each utterance type. We show that learner response accuracy and sensitivity to intonation are positively correlated with proficiency, and this association is affected by individual empathy levels in both response accuracy and sentence processing. Higher empathic individuals, in comparison with lower empathic individuals, appear to be more sensitive to intonation cues in the process of forming sound-meaning associations, though increased sensitivity does not necessarily imply increased processing speed. The results motivate the inclusion of measures of pragmatic skill, such as empathy, to better account for intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in second language acquisition.

Ideally, comprehensible second language (L2) speech would be seen as acceptable speech. However, the association between these dimensions is underexplored. To investigate the relationship between comprehensibility and “academic acceptability,” defined here as how well a speaker could meet the demands of a given role in an academic setting, 204 university stakeholders judged L2 speech samples elicited from a standardized English test used for university admissions. Four tasks from 100 speakers were coded for 13 speech stream characteristics. Judgments for comprehensibility and acceptability correlated strongly (r = .93). Linear mixed-effects models, used to examine judgments across all tasks and separately for each task, indicated that while random intercepts (i.e., speaker ability, listener severity) explained a substantial amount of total variation (32–44%) in listener judgments compared to speech characteristic fixed effects (8–21%), fixed effects did account for variation in speaker random effects (reducing variation compared to intercept-only models by 50–90%). Despite some minimal differences across task types, the influence of speech characteristics across both judgments was mostly similar. While providing evidence that comprehensible speech can indeed be perceived as acceptable, this study also provides evidence that speakers demonstrate both consistent and less consistent performance, in reference to speech stream production, across performances.

Non-native speech is difficult for native listeners to understand. While listeners can learn to understand non-native speech after exposure, it is unclear how to optimize this learning. Experimental subjects transcribed non-native speech and were paid either a flat rate or based on their performance. Participants who were paid based on performance demonstrated improved performance overall and faster learning than participants who were paid a flat rate. These results suggest that exposure alone is not sufficient to optimize learning of non-native speech and that current models of this process must be revised to account for the effects of motivation and incentive.

In the time since the term “intersectionality” was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term has gained a measure of widespread, even viral popularity. Increasingly, psycholinguists are citing this concept to promote work which more fully engages with the consequences of human diversity for language processing. This piece discusses the ways in which “intersectionality” has thus far been engaged by the field of psycholinguistics. I argue that the common usage of the term “intersectionality” is notably out of step with the tradition of Black feminist scholarship from which it derives. Originally defined as an analytical framework for examining the effect of interlocking oppressions in erasing the distinctive experiences of multiply marginalized people, intersectionality should not be invoked without any serious and specific discussion of oppressive systems or erasure. To achieve a more just and equitable applied psycholinguistics and authentically promote intersectional approaches to understanding language behavior, intersectionality must be taken as a framework primarily engaging with effects of structural violence. The article concludes with some guidelines for readers to assist in distinguishing “intersectional” claims which perform erasure from those which reflect the original and intended anti-misogynoir applications of the theory.

Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more just applied psycholinguistics requires researchers to explicitly consider the role of power in language, how power shapes fields’ notions of what research questions are important and meaningful, and therefore how research data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated. We argue that psycholinguists should widely adopt approaches to studying linguistic processing in ways which acknowledge the role of social ideologies in shaping their outcome, and which reckon with how asymmetrical power relations shape the perception, acquisition, and judgment of both social and linguistic variation. We conclude with a series of guidelines intended to promote characterizations of social and linguistic diversity which accurately reflect the importance of power differentials and which engage ethically with sociopolitical goals of justice and equity.

There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

This study conceptually replicated and extended Reid, Trofimovich, and O’Brien (2019), who found that native English speakers could be biased positively (or negatively) relative to a control condition in terms of how they rate non-native English speech. Our internet-based study failed to replicate Reid et al. across a wider population sample of “native” speakers (n = 189). Listeners did not change how they rated non-native English speech after social bias orientations and performed similarly across all five measures of speech and across age and race (Asian, Black, and Caucasian). We attribute our results to differences in the methods (in-person vs. online) and/or participants. Of note, roughly one-third of our “native” participants indicated proficiency in languages other than English and residency in 12 different English-speaking countries, despite identifying as a) fluent English speakers who b) used English primarily and c) acquired English before any other language from birth. These screening items taken together qualified “native” participants in line with traditional psycholinguistics research. We conclude that the concept of “nativeness” is tied to culture-specific perspectives surrounding language use. As such, the native/non-native categorical variable simultaneously serves and limits the advancement of psycholinguistics research.

There is a consensus in psycholinguistic research that listening to unfamiliar speech constitutes a challenging listening situation. In this commentary, we explore the problems with the construct of non-native and ask whether using this construct in research is useful, specifically to shift the communicative burden from the language learner to the perceiver, who often occupies a position of power. We examine what factors affect perception of non-native talkers. We frame this question by addressing the observation that not all “difficult” listening conditions provide equal challenges. Given this, we ask how cognitive and social factors impact perception of unfamiliar accents and ask what our psycholinguistic measurements are capturing. We close by making recommendations for future work. We propose that the issue is less with the terminology of native versus non-native, but rather how our unexamined biases affect the methodological assumptions that we make. We propose that we can use the existing dichotomy to create research programs that focus on teaching perceivers to better understand talkers more generally. Finally, we call on perceivers and researchers alike to question the idea of speech being “native,” “non-native,” “unfamiliar,” and “accented” to better align with reality as opposed to our inherently biased views.

Substance-free phonology or SFP (Reiss 2017) has renewed interest in the question of abstraction in phonology. Perhaps the most common form of abstraction through the absence of substance is underspecification, where some aspects of speech lack representation in memorized representations, within the phonology or in the phonetic implementation (Archangeli 1988, Keating 1988, Lahiri and Reetz 2010 among many others). The fundamental basis for phonology is argued to be a mental model of speech events in time, following Raimy (2000) and Papillon (2020). Each event can have properties (one-place predicates that are true of the event), which include the usual phonological features, and also structural entities for extended events like moras and syllables. Features can be bound together in an event, yielding segment-like properties. Pairs of events can be ordered in time by the temporal logic precedence relation represented by ‘<’. Events, features and precedence form a directed multigraph structure with edges in the graph interpreted as “maybe next”. Some infant bimodal speech perception results are examined using this framework, arguing for underspecification in time in the developing phonological representations.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of attention in understanding linguistic information even in a noisy environment. To assess the role of attention, we varied task instructions in two experiments in which participants were instructed to listen to short sentences and thereafter to type in the last word they heard or to type in the whole sentence. We were interested in how these task instructions influence the interplay between top-down prediction and bottom-up perceptual processes during language comprehension. Therefore, we created sentences that varied in the degree of predictability (low, medium, and high) as well as in the degree of speech degradation (four, six, and eight noise-vocoding channels). Results indicated better word recognition for highly predictable sentences for moderate, though not for high, levels of speech degradation, but only when attention was directed to the whole sentence. This underlines the important role of attention in language comprehension.