This study examines the utterance-initial prosodic marking of sarcasm in English and its perception in listeners who did and listeners who did not self-identify as being on the autism spectrum. We ask (i) whether speakers use prosody to mark sarcasm in the early, ‘pre-target’ portion of an utterance (that is, in the portion before a ‘target’ word most closely associated with the sarcastic intent occurs), (ii) whether individuals vary in how they mark sarcasm, (iii) whether listeners reliably recognize sarcasm from pre-target prosody alone, and (iv) whether recognition accuracy varies by speaker or self-identified autistic traits. Eight American English speakers were recorded producing utterances presented in contexts conducive to either sarcasm or sincerity. Pre-target parts were presented in a two-alternative forced-choice experiment to individuals who either did (n=51) or did not (n=44) self-identify as being on the autism spectrum, and were examined for syllable duration and f0-related properties (maximum, minimum, range, and wiggliness). Results show that speakers distinguish sarcasm and sincerity in the pre-target region with duration being the most salient marker. Most listeners recognize sarcasm from pre-target fragments, but there is variation in how well each speaker is perceived. Whether the listener self-identified as being on the autism spectrum or not does not predict sarcasm and sincerity recognition accuracy. The results provide evidence that utterance-initial prosody contributes to sarcasm recognition, with the proviso that speaker and listener variation be taken into account.

This study investigates how stress and metathesis interact in Sevillian Spanish, focusing on how their interaction sheds light on representation. Metathesis affects /s/–voiceless stop sequences, moving a debuccalised coda /s/ to the release of the following stop ( → [patha]). This process plausibly changes syllable structure: the syllable where /s/ originated is closed at one representational level, but open on the surface ([pah.ta] → [pa.tha]). The change in syllable structure could affect weight-sensitive stress, depending on the level speakers refer to in assigning stress. In a stress judgement task, Sevillian listeners treated syllables from which an /s/ had metathesised out similarly to heavy penults and differently from light penults. I outline a range of analyses to account for their behaviour, and suggest that a comprehensive analysis could include gestural representations and separate stress from metathesis, so that phonetic variability in the realisation of metathesis is permitted but does not affect stress.

In some languages, creaky voice is used over relatively long stretches of speech as a prosodic element, to convey emotion, and/or stylistically. A primary acoustic and perceptual cue to creaky voice quality is a low fundamental frequency. Previous research has shown that listeners can make fine-grained comparisons of speakers' habitual modal pitch, but this study focuses on how a combination of modal and nonmodal phonation affects the perception of habitual pitch. A perception experiment assesses whether listeners are more likely to rate a speaker's utterance as being holistically lower in pitch if it contains both modal and creaky voice than if it is fully modal speech. Results indicate that for female American English speakers with higher modal pitch, the inclusion of creaky voice leads listeners to rate such utterances as lower in pitch than fully modal utterances, but not for speakers with lower modal pitch. These results are consistent with studies showing that pitch perception interacts with nonmodal phonation, and they relate to previous observations that speakers may utilize nonmodal phonation to manipulate their intended habitual pitch.

This article explores the relationship between salience, stereotypes, and cooccurring language variables in the social perception of language. Following previous work, we argue that sociolinguistic perception is dependent upon the ability of listeners to map the linguistic cues contained in a speech signal to stereotypes. However, we contend that the understanding of which language features contribute to those stereotypes, and how they do so in the specific context of talk, has been limited because of the tendency to focus on preselected variables and to control for the context in which they occur. We advance an account of the role of stereotypes in the social perception of language by using a new tool for capturing, visualizing, and querying listeners' real-time reactions to voice samples. Our survey instrument collects reactions to two topically distinct guises from the same speaker (taken from the Scilly Voices corpus), both of which contained a similar number of regionally distinctive accent features. As our survey instrument includes a review function enabling listeners to provide information on why certain features were notable to them, we are able to interrogate listeners' ability to respond to unspecified linguistic features. Ultimately, this enables us to build a more nuanced account of the interaction between a range of linguistic features and their relationship to message content, and allows us to demonstrate that both do evaluative and perceptual work.

Our findings have important implications for those interested in understanding the situated meaning of linguistic features and, in particular, how researchers might continue to develop exemplar models of the ways in which social information is indexed to linguistic features. We argue that no experiment can be context-free and, as a result, researchers must consider ways of modeling the effects of co-present variants on a given exemplar, not just the social indices of specific exemplars themselves.

Much of the debate between naïve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination, we should prefer the content view to naïve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that both hallucinatory and veridical experiences possess immediacy. However, the standard variety of the content view that can provide such an explanation is not in a position to provide a unified explanation of a distinct aspect of perceptual phenomenology: perceptual experiences possess a presentational character that they share with imagery experiences (and which distinguishes both from conscious thoughts). Accordingly, I present an argument from imagination in defense of a non-standard variety of the content view—the sensory vehicle theory. Unlike its competitors, the sensory vehicle theory can provide unified explanations of why hallucinatory and veridical perceptual experiences possess immediacy, and why perceptual and imagery experiences possess their presentational character; as such, this theory provides a better explanation of the phenomenal facts than does either naïve realism or the standard variety of the content view.

Researchers assessing the nature of bicameralism have traditionally focused on the powers of upper chambers and potential (in)congruence with a lower chamber. Recently, the perceived legitimacy of upper chambers has been recognized as a vital third factor. However, previous studies measuring the upper chambers’ perceived legitimacy have (1) not considered whose perceived legitimacy is determinative (members of the institution vs. the general public) and (2) over-emphasized the input legitimacy. To explore the problems of the perceived legitimacy conceptualization, the qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews with Czech senators and Czech ‘ordinary citizens’ was used. It shows that perceptions among senators and the general public differ significantly. The results demonstrate that perceived legitimacy can be significantly influenced by factors such as the characteristics of senators, the apolitical nature of the institution’s processes, or the institution’s outputs. These may even overshadow the importance of input legitimacy in general, and democratic legitimacy in particular.

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early-emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

Auditory verbal hallucinations are a common phenomenon in the general population, with many people without psychological issues reporting the experience. In the ‘White Christmas’ method to induce auditory hallucinations, participants are told that they will be played a portion of the song ‘White Christmas’ and are asked to report when they hear it. Participants are presented only with stochastic noise; still, a large proportion of participants report hearing the song. The experiments reported here investigate how masking relationships modulate verbal hallucinations in the White-Christmas effect. Specifically, we tested how the effect is modulated by different kinds of maskers (multi-talker babble versus spectrally matched speech-shaped stochastic noise) and different kinds of expectation of the speech being masked (expecting a ‘normal’ modal voice versus a whispered voice behind the masking). The White Christmas effect was replicated, and the rate of verbal hallucinations was higher for multi-talker babble than for spectrally-matched speech-shaped stochastic noise. In addition, a trend for a higher rate of hallucination for whispered voices was found. These results confirm the role of masking relations in the White Christmas effect and reinforce the similarity between the White Christmas effect and continuity illusions such as phoneme restoration.