{"id":{"repo_id":"buffalo","oai_identifier":"oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/84008"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/buffalo/oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/84008","repository":{"repo_id":"buffalo","name":"Buffalo","base_url":"https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Adapting to Consistent Errors in Non-Native Speech","abstract":"Ph.D.","abstract_html":"Ph.D.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["St. Pierre, Thomas"],"institution":"State University of New York at Buffalo","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Koenig, Jean-Pierre","Linguistics"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2022,"date_issued":"2022-06-21T15:46:59Z","date_published":"2022-06-21T15:46:59Z","updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:28Z","subjects":["linguistics","experimental psychology","Language"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/10477/84008","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Koenig, Jean-Pierre","Linguistics"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["St. Pierre, Thomas"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2022-06-21T15:46:59Z","2020"]},{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["State University of New York at Buffalo"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Text","Dissertation"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["linguistics","experimental psychology","Language"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/84008"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Ph.D.","When speaking with someone new, listeners quickly pick up on the regularities in their interlocutor’s linguistic system—e.g., their allophony (Dahan et al., 2008), syntactic attachment style (Kamide, 2012), and word choice (Metzing & Brennan, 2003)—and use that information to help process their speech. However, when such information is incorrect and unreliable, listeners no longer use it to facilitate processing (van Heugten & Christophe, 2013). In fact, before a conversation begins, listeners may decide to make less use of linguistic cues when they expect the signal will be unreliable, as in conversations with L2 speakers (Lev-Ari, 2015). This dissertation examines situations where L2 errors are both consistent and reliable, asking whether listeners can take advantage of the regularities in errors to facilitate comprehension. This dissertation looks at the learning of consistent errors in two domains: Syntactic agreement and word choice. For syntactic agreement errors, two visual world experiments show that listeners can learn errors in subject/verb agreement; after hearing sentences like Where *is the pants, listeners eventually come to expect pants as a possible continuation after hearing Where is...?. Experiment 3, an additional visual world study, examines the learning of consistent errors in grammatical gender agreement. In this experiment, native German listeners were exposed to a non-native speaker who consistently mis-assigned grammatical gender to particular nouns (e.g., saying *der[MASC] Kuh instead of die[FEM] Kuh ‘the cow’); similar to Experiments 1 and 2, listeners showed signs of having learned to associate a noun with an incorrect determiner. For word choice errors, Experiments 4 (visual world) and 5 (mouse-tracking) demonstrate that listeners can learn incorrect labels for specific objects (e.g., learn to associate the label cauliflower with a picture of broccoli). In addition, Experiment 5a shows that listeners continue to expect these incorrect labels even when switching to a native speaker, who should be expected to not produce lexical errors. The final experiments look at whether adapting to incorrect labels produced by a non-native speaker (e.g., calling broccoli cauliflower) differs depending on how biased someone is against foreigners (measured by an Implicit Association Task). One mouse-tracking experiment, conducted in a rural, mostly white community in northern Maine, found that less biased individuals were better able to adapt across the experiment compared to more biased individuals. However, a similar experiment, conducted with a more diverse population of undergrads at the University at Buffalo, was unable to replicate these findings. All in all, this dissertation shows that listeners are able to attend to and learn consistent syntactic and lexical errors in order to facilitate the processing of non-native speech. Listeners will even transfer these learned errors to the processing of native speech. While bias against foreigners may play a role in how listeners adapt to errors in non-native speech, more research is required to understand exactly how and in what circumstances this occurs.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Adapting to Consistent Errors in Non-Native Speech"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Koenig, Jean-Pierre","Linguistics"],"dc:creator":["St. Pierre, Thomas"],"dc:date":["2022-06-21T15:46:59Z","2020"],"dc:description":["Ph.D.","When speaking with someone new, listeners quickly pick up on the regularities in their interlocutor’s linguistic system—e.g., their allophony (Dahan et al., 2008), syntactic attachment style (Kamide, 2012), and word choice (Metzing & Brennan, 2003)—and use that information to help process their speech. However, when such information is incorrect and unreliable, listeners no longer use it to facilitate processing (van Heugten & Christophe, 2013). In fact, before a conversation begins, listeners may decide to make less use of linguistic cues when they expect the signal will be unreliable, as in conversations with L2 speakers (Lev-Ari, 2015). This dissertation examines situations where L2 errors are both consistent and reliable, asking whether listeners can take advantage of the regularities in errors to facilitate comprehension. This dissertation looks at the learning of consistent errors in two domains: Syntactic agreement and word choice. For syntactic agreement errors, two visual world experiments show that listeners can learn errors in subject/verb agreement; after hearing sentences like Where *is the pants, listeners eventually come to expect pants as a possible continuation after hearing Where is...?. Experiment 3, an additional visual world study, examines the learning of consistent errors in grammatical gender agreement. In this experiment, native German listeners were exposed to a non-native speaker who consistently mis-assigned grammatical gender to particular nouns (e.g., saying *der[MASC] Kuh instead of die[FEM] Kuh ‘the cow’); similar to Experiments 1 and 2, listeners showed signs of having learned to associate a noun with an incorrect determiner. For word choice errors, Experiments 4 (visual world) and 5 (mouse-tracking) demonstrate that listeners can learn incorrect labels for specific objects (e.g., learn to associate the label cauliflower with a picture of broccoli). In addition, Experiment 5a shows that listeners continue to expect these incorrect labels even when switching to a native speaker, who should be expected to not produce lexical errors. The final experiments look at whether adapting to incorrect labels produced by a non-native speaker (e.g., calling broccoli cauliflower) differs depending on how biased someone is against foreigners (measured by an Implicit Association Task). One mouse-tracking experiment, conducted in a rural, mostly white community in northern Maine, found that less biased individuals were better able to adapt across the experiment compared to more biased individuals. However, a similar experiment, conducted with a more diverse population of undergrads at the University at Buffalo, was unable to replicate these findings. All in all, this dissertation shows that listeners are able to attend to and learn consistent syntactic and lexical errors in order to facilitate the processing of non-native speech. Listeners will even transfer these learned errors to the processing of native speech. While bias against foreigners may play a role in how listeners adapt to errors in non-native speech, more research is required to understand exactly how and in what circumstances this occurs.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/84008"],"dc:language":["eng"],"dc:publisher":["State University of New York at Buffalo"],"dc:rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"dc:subject":["linguistics","experimental psychology","Language"],"dc:title":["Adapting to Consistent Errors in Non-Native Speech"],"dc:type":["Text","Dissertation"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:28Z"}