Abstract

Language is highly variable. In American English, the word WALKING can be pronounced as either walking or the more casual walkin’. This talk examines how different types of sociolinguistic knowledge and processes are integrated in speech perception under circumstances of uncertainty. I will demonstrate that phonological variant identification in perception is subject to psycholinguistic priming. This phonological variant priming effect, however, decays rapidly over time, after only one monosyllabic word, differing from temporal properties of phonological variant persistence in conversational speech. I further show that variant priming is modulated jointly by social and linguistic unexpectedness.

Bio

Dr. Aini Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. Before joining CityU, she earned her PhD in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Her research integrates sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics: She uses experimental and corpus approaches to examine cognitive mechanisms underlying the perception and production of sociostylistic variation. She has worked on perceptual aspects of cue integration in speech and social perception. Additionally, she has an interest in multi-dimensional dynamics of speech production in individuals. Her work has been published in multiple international peer-reviewed journals, including Language Variation and Change, Asia-Pacific Language Variation, Cognitive Science, Journal of Acoustical Society of America, and Laboratory Phonology.