When one speaker’s broccoli is another speaker’s cauliflower: the real-time processing of multiple speaker vocabularies

ABSTRACT

Once interlocutors settle on a specific label in conversation, they tend to maintain the linguistic precedent and reuse the same label (i.e. they become lexically entrained). This helps to facilitate comprehension, with listeners identifying referents more quickly when repeated labels are used compared to new labels. In the current study, we looked at whether listeners are additionally sensitive to repeated infelicitous labels (Experiment 1), as when non-native speakers, for example, overgeneralise a term (e.g. identifying a chair as the chair with tires). In addition, we investigated the extent to which listeners’ expectations of incorrect labels are influenced by knowledge of community speaking patterns, testing whether listeners could disregard recently encountered lexical errors from a non-native speaker as possible labels when processing a native speaker, who should not be expected to produce such errors (Experiment 2). Our results provide no evidence that listeners were able to take into account speaker information.

KEYWORDS:

• Spoken word recognition
• adaptation
• non-native speech processing
• lexical errors

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gail Mauner, Marieke van Heugten and members of the Psycholinguistics lab at the University at Buffalo.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/H7J6W.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that while entrainment is typically used to refer to the consistent use of the same referential expressions in production, in the current study, we also use entrainment to refer to listeners’ expectation that the same referential expressions will be reused.

2 Resampling and testing the data 1000 times with different Ns (30, 50, 70, and 90) revealed that only between 70 and 90 participants would have been needed to detect the interactions reported in the four main analyses with a power of .80. The other tasks conducted as part of the larger study occurred after the task reported in Experiment 2, so their presence did not influence the results.