Although children with cochlear implants (CIs) have limited access to pitch information due to the suboptimal device transmission, durational cues are relatively well preserved, allowing for the acquisition of prosodic cues needed for communication. Recent findings show that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs can produce prosodic cues (e.g., duration and pitch) to disambiguate noun-noun compounds (e.g., xiong-mao “panda”) and lists (e.g., xiong, mao “bear, cat”), with those implanted early (before age 2) demonstrating production patterns similar to their typical hearing (TH) peers. This then raises questions about these children’s ability to perceive prosodic cues, and if early implantation again enhances their performance. These questions were investigated using a two-alternative forced-choice task with 57 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs and 66 TH peers. The results show that all preschoolers can perceive the prosodic cues needed to identify compounds but not lists, suggesting that, like English, the mapping between prosodic cues and postlexical meaning is also acquired late in children learning a tonal language. In terms of the effect of CIs, those implanted before age 2 performed as well as their TH peers. These findings suggest that preschoolers may rely more on other linguistic information rather than prosodic cues when comprehending compounds and lists, offering cross-linguistic evidence for this tendency. Furthermore, interventions for preschoolers with CIs should support the mapping of prosodic cues to discourse functions rather than just vocabulary training, improving daily communicative abilities.

The idea that God must relate perfectly to our subjectivity is central to Linda Zagzebski’s work on omnisubjectivity. There is a hitherto undiagnosed tension, however, between different criteria one might use to judge what perfectly relating to our subjectivity consists in. God’s relationship to what Zagzebski calls ‘counteractuals’, individuals that do not exist but that could have, brings this tension into focus. On the one hand, if God does not know what the subjective experiences of counteractuals would be like, then God’s omnisubjectivity would appear to be unacceptably limited in scope. On the other hand, if God knows the subjectivity of actual creatures in the same way that God knows the subjectivity of counteractual creatures, then the motivation for omnisubjectivity ends up being undercut to a significant extent. This essay resolves this tension with a model that draws on interpersonal perception and divine introspection.

After a brief overview of tardive dyskinesia, this targeted narrative review will examine the psychosocial consequences of tardive dyskinesia on patients’ daily lives, including stigma, social withdrawal, and quality of life, as well as impact on physical functioning. The extant literature on the impact of tardive dyskinesia on patients and their caregivers is described and summarized, including how patients with tardive dyskinesia perceive the severity and impact of their motor symptoms and whether this aligns with clinical observations by their treaters.

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.