When one speaker’s broccoli is another speaker’s cauliflower: the real-time processing of multiple speaker vocabularies

Once interlocutors settle on a specific label in conversation, they tend to maintain the linguistic precedent and reuse the same label (i.e. they become lexically entrained). This helps to facilitate comprehension, with listeners identifying referents more quickly when repeated labels are used compared to new labels. In the current study, we looked at whether listeners are additionally sensitive to repeated infelicitous labels (Experiment 1), as when non-native speakers, for example, overgeneralise a term (e.g. identifying a chair as the chair with tires). In addition, we investigated the extent to which listeners’ expectations of incorrect labels are influenced by knowledge of community speaking patterns, testing whether listeners could disregard recently encountered lexical errors from a non-native speaker as possible labels when processing a native speaker, who should not be expected to produce such errors (Experiment 2). Our results provide no evidence that listeners were able to take into account speaker information.