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Grand-average waveforms calculated over the full dataset, averaged over all participants, electrodes, and the three sessions.
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Humans possess a robust speech-perception apparatus that is able to cope with variation in spoken language. However, linguists have often claimed that this coping ability must be limited, since otherwise there is no way for such variation to lead to language change and regional accents. Previous research has shown that the presence or absence of pe...
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This chapter employs a range of different corpora to examine pragmatic variation within the same language in some detail. However, before we begin the corpus work, it is worth exploring the study of linguistic variation in general. The first point of note is that the study of language variation has traditionally focused on phonological, lexical and...
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... In parallel-constraint satisfaction models, categorical information such as cultural identity is a critical constraint on how impressions are formed about others (Kunda & Thagard, 1996). The perception of an outgroup accent is known to affect subsequent speech processing based on intelligibility and familiarity (Derwing & Munro, 1997;Floccia et al., 2009;Jiang et al., 2020;Voeten & Levelt, 2019). Related to familiarity, accented speech is often subject to biases that can alter social impressions and constrain pragmatic processing (Heblich et al., 2015;Jiang et al., 2020;Pélissier & Ferragne, 2021). ...
When complaining, speakers can use their voice to convey a feeling of pain, even when describing innocuous events. Rapid detection of emotive and identity features of the voice may constrain how the semantic content of complaints is processed, as indexed by N400 and P600 effects evoked by the final, pain-related word. Twenty-six participants listened to statements describing painful and innocuous events expressed in a neutral or complaining voice, produced by ingroup and outgroup accented speakers. Participants evaluated how hurt the speaker felt under EEG monitoring. Principal Component Analysis of Event-Related Potentials from the final word onset demonstrated N400 and P600 increases when complainers described innocuous vs. painful events in a neutral voice, but these effects were altered when utterances were expressed in a complaining voice. Independent of prosody, N400 amplitudes increased for complaints spoken in outgroup vs. ingroup accents. Results demonstrate that prosody and accent constrain the processing of spoken complaints as proposed in a parallel-constraint-satisfaction model.
... Other studies argue that early processing of outgroup accents is actually indexed by an increased Phonological Mapping Negativity (Goslin et al., 2012;Porretta et al., 2017), occurring in a similar time-window. At later processing stages, outgroup accents are also found to affect task-based N400 responses by reducing N400 responses during truth evaluation (Foucart et al., 2019;Foucart and Hartsuiker, 2021), but increasing them during phonetic or semantic anomaly processing (Romero-Rivas et al., 2015;Voeten and Levelt, 2019), suggesting that outgroup accents can elicit either shallower or deeper processing of speech-related cues depending on task focus and/or contextual constraints. This effect also appear to be sensitive to perspective-taking, revealing increased effort in processing conflicting spoken content and speaker identity (van den Brink et al., 2012), status-based accent perception (Pélissier and Ferragne, 2022), or out-group believability (Foucart and Hartsuiker, 2021;Jiang et al., 2020). ...
Interpersonal communication often involves sharing our feelings with others; complaining, for example, aims to elicit empathy in listeners by vocally expressing a speaker's suffering. Despite the growing neuroscientific interest in the phenomenon of empathy, few have investigated how it is elicited in real time by vocal signals (prosody), and how this might be affected by interpersonal factors, such as a speaker's cultural background (based on their accent). To investigate the neural processes at play when hearing spoken complaints, twenty-six French participants listened to complaining and neutral utterances produced by in-group French and out-group Québécois (i.e., French-Canadian) speakers. Participants rated how hurt the speaker felt while their cerebral activity was monitored with electroencephalography (EEG). Principal Component Analysis of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) taken at utterance onset showed culture-dependent time courses of emotive prosody processing. The high motivational relevance of ingroup complaints increased the P200 response compared to all other utterance types; in contrast, outgroup complaints selectively elicited an early posterior negativity in the same time window, followed by an increased N400 (due to ongoing effort to derive affective meaning from outgroup voices). Ingroup neutral utterances evoked a late negativity which may reflect re-analysis of emotively less salient, but culturally relevant ingroup speech. Results highlight the time-course of neurocognitive responses that contribute to emotive speech processing for complaints, establishing the critical role of prosody as well as social-relational factors (i.e., cultural identity) on how listeners are likely to “empathize” with a speaker.
... The observation that the Flemish participants became more Netherlandic-like in their perception of the [ei] vowel after four months' time is thus an observation of grammar learning, not of changes in perception. ERP responses to regional accent reflect two distinct processes of perceptual compensation This chapter has been published as: Voeten, C. C., & Levelt, C. C. (2019). ERP responses to regional accent reflect two distinct processes of perceptual compensation. ...
This dissertation investigates how sound change is adopted by speakers and
listeners, based on a currently-ongoing cluster of changes in Dutch termed the
‘Polder shift’. The main aim of the dissertation is to form a bridge between five
key areas of linguistics: historical phonology, sociophonetics, psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, and quantitative linguistics. A unified account of these different
angles to the study of sound change is not trivial. This dissertation uses
psycholinguistic experiments combined with detailed quantitative analysis to
study the contributions of the different components to the adoption of sound
change in the medium and long term.
The population studied in this dissertation is sociolinguistic migrants: in this
case, Flemish speakers of Dutch who have migrated to the Netherlands, and
thereby migrated from a non-Polder-shift area to a Polder-shift area. The
methods adopted in this dissertation include a corpus study of regional variation,
longitudinal psycholinguistic experiments over nine months’ time, cross-sectional
psycholinguistic experiments spanning multiple decades of apparent time, and two
neurolinguistic studies using EEG. Results show that the sociolinguistic migrants
rapidly acquire allophonic variation at the phonological level (albeit not necessarily
the associated sociolinguistic knowledge), but that it takes a long time (more than
nine months, up to multiple decades) for this to carry forward to their behavioral
production and perception, and moreover is subject to significant individual
differences. The contributions by this dissertation show how the fundamentally
sociolinguistic phenomenon of sound change can be studied empirically using
psycho- and neurolinguistics, and profit from recent innovations in statistics.
