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1. Expecting a challenge: A behavioral and neurophysiological investigation of talker identity in cross-dialectal speech perception

   https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.19053  

   Zaharchuk, Holly; Walker, Abby; Miller, Adrianna; Fernandez, Carla; Van_Hell, Janet (March 2026, Laboratory Phonology)

   Holliday, Jeff; Lee-KIm, Sang-Im; Cho, Taehong (Ed.)

   Listeners use their knowledge about a talker to guide speech perception. In the present study, we manipulated both the familiarity and predictability of this talker-specific knowledge. Twenty-two listeners from western Pennsylvania completed an audio-visual lexical decision task while EEG was recorded. Critically, listeners were introduced to the talkers beforehand, with short videos establishing the talker’s U.S. English accent identity: Mainstream, more similar to the participants themselves; Southern, a relatively less familiar variety; and Unpredictable, which switched between Mainstream and Southern accents. During the task, listeners watched these talkers produce tokens with accents that either aligned with or violated their accent identity. Behaviorally, alignment between talker and token accent influenced performance on Southern-accented tokens, while accuracy on Mainstream-accented tokens was nearly at ceiling regardless of talker accent identity. Neurally, accent familiarity had the largest effect pre-speech (in response to the visual presentation of the talker), while both predictability and familiarity impacted processing of the speech signal itself. Overall, our results suggest that listeners use information about a talker’s accent, even when it is unfamiliar or unpredictable, to alter their listening strategies for more successful speech recognition. 

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2. Talker-specific perceptual adaptation to second-language speech-in-noise: Tuning-in to the talker while tuning-out the noise

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0036844  

   Kim, Seung-Eun; Goldrick, Matthew; Bradlow, Ann R (June 2025, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   When listeners encounter a difficult-to-understand talker in a difficult-to-understand situation, their perceptual mechanisms can adapt, making the talker in the situation easier to understand. This study examined talker-specific perceptual adaptation experimentally by embedding speech from second-language (L2) English talkers in varying levels of noise and collecting transcriptions from first-language English listeners (ten talkers, 100 listeners per experiment). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that prior experience with a L2 talker's speech presented first without noise and then with gradually increasing levels of noise facilitated recognition of that talker in loud noise. Experiment 3 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-in to the talker's voice and speech patterns, by examining recognition of speech-in-loud-noise following experience with the talker in quiet. Finally, experiment 4 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-out the background noise, by measuring speech-in-loud-noise recognition after experience with the talker in consistently loud noise. The results showed that both tuning-in to the talker and tuning-out the noise contribute to talker-specific perceptual adaptation to L2 speech-in-noise. 

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3. Engineering creativity: Prior experience modulates electrophysiological responses to novel metaphors

   https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13630  

   Jonczyk, R; Kremer, G; Siddique, Z; Van Hell, J G (January 2020, Psychophysiology)

   null (Ed.)

   Novel metaphorical language use exemplifies human creativity through production and comprehension of meaningful linguistic expressions that may have never been heard before. Available electrophysiological research demonstrates, however, that novel metaphor comprehension is cognitively costly, as it requires integrating information from distantly related concepts. Herein, we investigate if such cognitive cost may be reduced as a factor of prior domain knowledge. To this end, we asked engineering and nonengineering students to read for comprehension literal, novel metaphorical, and anomalous sentences related to engineering or general knowledge, while undergoing EEG recording. Upon reading each sentence, participants were asked to judge whether or not the sentence was original in meaning (novelty judgment) and whether or not it made sense (sensicality judgment). When collapsed across groups, our findings demonstrate a gradual N400 modulation with N400 being maximal in response to anomalous, followed by metaphorical, and literal sentences. Between-group comparisons revealed a mirror effect on the N400 to novel metaphorical sentences, with attenuated N400 in engineers and enhanced N400 in non-engineers. Critically, planned comparisons demonstrated reduced N400 amplitudes to engineering novel metaphors in engineers relative to non-engineers, pointing to an effect of prior knowledge on metaphor processing. This reduction, however, was observed in the absence of a sentence type × knowledge × group interaction. Altogether, our study provides novel evidence suggesting that prior domain knowledge may have a direct impact on creative language comprehension. 

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4. Sequence effects during speech perception reveal multi-accent processing costs

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03220-5  

   McLaughlin, Drew J; Colvett, Jackson S; Bugg, Julie M; Van_Engen, Kristin J (April 2026, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)

   Abstract Alternating between different talkers during listening typically incurs a cognitive processing cost. How these processing costs manifest, and potentially differ, in a multi-accent setting remains to be examined. Across two experiments, we investigate (1) whether talker and accent switching costs are driven by engagement of a recalibration mechanism, and (2) whether global listening context affects the magnitude of talker and accent switching costs. The results of our first experiment indicate that switching between speakers of the same second language (L2) accent (e.g., between two Mandarin-accented speakers of English) was less cognitively challenging than switching between speakers of different L2 accents (e.g., between a Mandarin-accented speaker and a Turkish-accented speaker of English). This outcome suggests that the perceptual distance (i.e., the holistic estimate of spectral and temporal differences in acoustic signals) between two speakers’ productions determines the size of associated switching costs, such that recalibration is less cognitively demanding for speakers with the same L2 accent. In our second experiment, we examine whether a more challenging block-wide listening context results in a global upregulation of cognitive resources, and, subsequently, reduces the cognitive resources required to (a) process L2 accent and (b) resolve local talker and accent changes. Here, the overall cognitive demands of processing L2 accent were reduced, as predicted, but talker and accent switching costs were not. We conclude that talker and accent switching are supported by a recalibration mechanism and that global upregulation of cognitive resources may reduce L2 accent processing costs but not local switching costs. 

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5. Predicting intelligibility from pronunciation distance metrics

   Bent, T.; Holt, R.F. (August 2023, Guarant International)

   Radek Skarnitzl & Jan Volín (Ed.)

   Unfamiliar native and non-native accents can cause word recognition challenges, particularly in noisy environments, but few studies have incorporated quantitative pronunciation distance metrics to explain intelligibility differences across accents. Here, intelligibility was measured for 18 talkers -- two from each of three native, one bilingual, and five non- native accents -- in three listening conditions (quiet and two noise conditions). Two variations of the Levenshtein pronunciation distance metric, which quantifies phonemic differences from a reference accent, were assessed for their ability to predict intelligibility. An unweighted Levenshtein distance metric was the best intelligibility predictor; talker accent further predicted performance. Accuracy did not fall along a native - non-native divide. Thus, phonemic differences from the listener’s home accent primarily determine intelligibility, but other accent- specific pronunciation features, including suprasegmental characteristics, must be quantified to fully explain intelligibility across talkers and listening conditions. These results have implications for pedagogical practices and speech perception theories. 

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