The Unforeseen Consequences of Interacting With Non‐Native Speakers

Sociolinguistic research shows that listeners' expectations of speakers influence their interpretation of the speech, yet this is often ignored in cognitive models of language comprehension. Here, we focus on the case of interactions between native and non-native speakers. Previous literature shows that listeners process the language of non-native speakers in less detail, because they expect them to have lower linguistic competence. We show that processing the language of non-native speakers increases lexical competition and access in general, not only of the non-native speaker's speech, and that this leads to poorer memory of one's own speech during the interaction. We further find that the degree to which people adjust their processing to non-native speakers is related to the degree to which they adjust their speech to them. We discuss implications for cognitive models of language processing and sociolinguistic research on attitudes

A functional theory of illusory conjunctions and neon colors

Illusory conjunctions are the incorrect perceptual combination of briefly presented colors and shapes. In the neon colors illusion, achromatic figures take on the color of an overlaid grid of colored lines. Both illusions are explained by a theory that assumes (a) poor location information or poor spatial resolution for some aspects of visual information and (b) that the spatial location of features is constrained by perceptual organization. Computer simulations demonstrate that the mechanisms suggested by the theory are useful in veridical perception and they are sufficient to produce illusory conjunctions. The theory suggests mechanisms that economically encode visual information in a way that filters noise and fills in missing data. Issues related to neural implementation are discussed. Four experiments illustrate the theory. Illusory conjunctions are shown to be affected by objective stimulus organization, by subjective organization, and by the linguistic structure of ambiguous Hebrew words. Neon colors are constrained by linguistic structure in the same way as illusory conjunctions. Marr (1982) suggested that the study of vision can be conceptualized in three related levels of analysis. At the computational level, a specific functional problem in vision i

You said it before and you'll say it again: Expectations of consistency in communication.

Repeated reference creates strong expectations in addressees that a speaker will continue to use the same expression for the same object. The authors investigate the root reason for these expectations by comparing a cooperativeness-based account (Grice, 1975) with a simpler consistency-based account. In two eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the expectations underlying the effect of prece-dents on comprehension. The authors show that listeners expect speakers to be consistent in their use of expressions even when these expectations cannot be motivated by the assumption of cooperativeness. The authors conclude that though this phenomenon seems to be motivated by cooperativeness, listeners’ expectation that speakers be consistent in their use of expressions is governed by a general expectation of consistency

Using a foreign language reduces mental imagery.

This is the data associated with the following paper: Hayakawa, S., & Keysar, B. (2018). Using a foreign language reduces mental imagery. Cognition, 173, 8-15