Not for an Afternoon

Listeners Withhold Phonetic Retuning from a Talker They Are Told Is Temporarily Numb

A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reports a pre-registered perceptual learning experiment in which 192 listeners heard identical recordings of a talker whose /s/ was ambiguous, under one of four on-screen accounts of why. Listeners told beforehand that the talker was numb from a dental anaesthetic left their /s/–/ʃ/ category boundary where it was; those told the talker always speaks so, or told nothing, moved it by about a continuum step.

@misc{slop_wl3ob4,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Vigdis Emenike and Eivind Onwuka},
  title        = {Not for an Afternoon: Listeners Withhold Phonetic Retuning from a Talker They Are Told Is Temporarily Numb},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.wl3ob4},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-listeners-told-that-wl3ob4/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}