2025
- UofALanguage comprehension under uncertainty: The pragmatic implications of non-native accents and the role of individual differencesPuhacheuskaya, V.University of Alberta
Ph.D. DissertationThis dissertation explores the pragmatic implications of speaking with a non-native accent when the listeners or readers are native speakers. Specifically, it focuses on the comprehension of language associated with either linguistic uncertainty, such as irony and metaphors, or epistemic uncertainty, such as statements of uncertain truth. As non-nativeness is commonly associated with less accuracy in semantic choices, reduced shared knowledge and lower social status, as well as disrupted processing fluency, it should have negative consequences for the perception of uncertain language. On the other hand, literal language or facts known to be true or false may remain unaffected. Further, it explores whether comprehension of non-native speech is modulated by individual differences, offering the first investigation of generalized implicit foreign accent bias as a predictor of non-native language processing while also examining the effect of explicit attitudes toward non-native accents, political orientation, and cognitive and personality traits. This dissertation comprises four behavioural experiments and one acoustic analysis. The first two experiments investigate linguistic uncertainty in different modalities, while the other two examine epistemic uncertainty in different modalities. Experiment 1 investigates the perception of native and non-native irony using dialogs with natural prosody. The results indicate that all types of non-native irony are perceived as less ironic and cause greater hesitation during interpretation. This effect is unlikely to stem from reduced intelligibility, as demonstrated by both lack of correlation between intelligibility and irony ratings and subsequent work in the field with converging findings that used no oral speech (Bazzi et al., 2022). While political leaning significantly predicted irony comprehension accuracy, this effect was uniform across native and non-native speakers. An ad hoc fine-grained acoustic analysis of the stimuli used in Experiment 1 suggested that non-native speakers may engage in compensatory behaviour wherein they prosodically mark all irony types significantly more than native speakers and even invest extra prosodic effort when the social cost of being misunderstood is too high, as is the case with ironic praise. Experiment 2 investigates the perception of metaphorical language in a strictly written modality. The results suggest that all sentences are perceived as less sensical when attributed to an immigrant speaker with a strong non-native accent. Incorporating the non-native speaker identity also takes more cognitive effort, as reflected in longer processing and evaluation times. Multiple cognitive, social, and personality variables modulated the results. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate whether non-nativeness affects truth evaluation of domain-specific unknown facts. While substantial work in the field has investigated this issue before, the results remain extremely inconclusive (e.g., Foucart et al., 2020; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010; Souza & Markman, 2013). Competing theoretical frameworks attribute the potential lower credibility of non-native speakers to either processing disfluency or social categorization. The present experiments focus on domain-specific facts and probe the malleability of social categorization effects by manipulating the group membership of non-native speakers, introducing them as either Canadian citizens or immigrants. Experiment 3 uses written modality and shows weak evidence that non-native speakers may be considered less credible on unknown statements. Experiment 4 uses auditory modality and, surprisingly, shows that people are more inclined to believe all statements spoken by a non-native individual introduced as a Canadian citizen. This suggests a modality-specific group membership change that brings about a “knowledgeable immigrant” effect. This effect was limited to monolingual participants and absent for bilinguals. In addition, Experiments 2 to 4 employ an Implicit Association Test with knowledgeability attributes, which reveled a significant bias against non-native speakers. Crucially, the strength of this bias modulated truth ratings in Experiment 4. Together, the findings of this dissertation highlight the powerful influence of social expectations in language comprehension and show that the effects of non-nativeness extend beyond processing fluency, interacting with personal and social factors. Based on the findings of this dissertation, I argue that the linguistic identity of the speaker manifested in their accent has a larger negative impact on the resolution of linguistic uncertainty than epistemic uncertainty, but the effects of non-nativeness are not always limited to a particular trope and may affect figurative and literal sentences alike.
2025
- Acta PsycholSorry, you make less sense to me: The effect of non-native speaker status on metaphor processingPuhacheuskaya, V., and Järvikivi, J.,Acta Psychologica
Preconceived assumptions about the speaker have been shown to strongly and automatically influence speech interpretation. This study contributes to previous research by investigating the impact of non-nativeness on perceived metaphor sensibility. To eliminate the effects of speech disfluency, we used exclusively written sentences but introduced their “authors” as having a strong native or non-native accent through a written vignette. Importantly, the author’s language proficiency was never mentioned. Metaphorical sentences featured familiar (“The pictures streamed through her head”) and unfamiliar (“The textbooks snored on the desk”) verbal metaphors and closely matched literal expressions from a pre-tested database. We also administered a battery of psychological tests to assess whether ratings could be predicted by individual differences. The results revealed that all sentences attributed to the non-native speaker were perceived as less sensical, with the largest difference for familiar metaphors and barely any difference for literal sentences. Incorporating the identity of the non-native speaker also took more effort, as indicated by longer processing and evaluation times. This suggests that the mere expectation of lower language proficiency induced by describing the person as strongly foreign-accented affects how sensical their language is perceived. Additionally, while a general bias against non-native speakers emerged even without oral speech, person-based factors played a significant role. Lower ratings of non-native compared to native speakers were largely driven by individuals from less linguistically diverse backgrounds and those with less cognitive reflection. Extraversion and political ideology also modulated ratings in a unique way. The study highlights the impact of preconceived notions about the speaker on sentence processing and the importance of taking interpersonal variation into account.
2022
- PLoS OneCOVIDisgust: Language processing through the lens of partisanshipPuhacheuskaya, V., Hubert Lyall, I., and Järvikivi, J.,PLOS ONE
Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.
2022
- Acta PsycholI was being sarcastic!: The effect of foreign accent and political ideology on irony (mis)understandingPuhacheuskaya, V., and Järvikivi, J.,Acta Psychologica
Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker’s intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener’s political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.
2021
- ZFSWThe influence of aspect on the countability of Polish deverbal nominalizations: Evidence from an acceptability rating studyZeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
The paper presents the results of a study investigating a possible influence of the viewpoint (perfective vs. imperfective) and lexical (telic vs. atelic) aspect of Polish verbs on the countability of eventive nominalizations (substantiva verbalia) derived from these verbs. Polish substantiva verbalia preserve many properties of the base verbs, including the eventive meaning and aspectual morphology. Native speakers of Polish rated the acceptability of nominalizations in count and mass contexts. An effect of both viewpoint and lexical aspect was found in mass contexts, where aspectually delimited (perfective, accomplishment) nominalizations were less acceptable than non-delimited (imperfective, state) nominalizations. In count contexts, only an effect of the lexical aspect was clearly present, with accomplishment nominalizations being more acceptable than state nominalizations. The nominalizations were overall rated as more natural in mass than count constructions, regardless of the aspect. The results indicate that aspect plays a role in establishing the countability of a word, but it does not fully determine it.
2020
- GliWThe role of syntactic and semantic constraints in relative clause attachment processing in Russian: An eye-tracking studyGenerative Linguistics in Wrocław No. 7
An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to examine relative clause attachment processing in Russian speakers and how it is affected by syntactic and semantic constraints. Attachment was manipulated by either morphological means (gender-marking) or semantic bias. Previous experiments on Russian found a dissociation between early and late measures, which agreed with the Relativized Relevance principle proposed by Frazier (1990) claiming that early attachment preference observed in cross-linguistic studies is determined by rather late processes and disguises effects of the Late Closure strategy (Chernova and Chernigovskaya, 2015). The present experiment showed no evidence in favor of the Late Closure strategy in initial syntactic commitments (first-pass time). Early attachment had a significant reading time advantage in second-pass and dwell time, agreeing with the Constraint Satisfaction accounts. When disambiguation was syntactic (i.e., by morphological means), late attached relative pronouns received the highest number of incoming regressions. When disambiguation was semantic, late attached verbs demonstrated the highest number of outgoing regressions. Regressions to competing NPs showed that NP1 was reread twice more often than NP2, which was not correlated with noun frequencies. Accuracy was significantly higher for syntactically constrained sentences and sentences with early attached relative clause modifiers. Everything seems to confirm early attachment preference in Russian.