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When talkers anticipate that a listener may have difficulty understanding their speech, they adopt a speaking style typically described as “clear speech.” This speaking style includes a variety of acoustic modifications and has perceptual benefits for listeners. In the present study, we examine whether clear speaking styles also include modulation of lexical items selected and produced during naturalistic conversations. Our results demonstrate that talkers do, indeed, modulate their lexical selection, as measured by a variety of lexical diversity and lexical sophistication indices. Further, the results demonstrate that clear speech is not a monolithic construct. Talkers modulate their speech differently depending on the communication situation. We suggest that clear speech should be conceptualized as a set of speaking styles, in which talkers take the listener and communication situation into consideration.

There is a consensus in psycholinguistic research that listening to unfamiliar speech constitutes a challenging listening situation. In this commentary, we explore the problems with the construct of non-native and ask whether using this construct in research is useful, specifically to shift the communicative burden from the language learner to the perceiver, who often occupies a position of power. We examine what factors affect perception of non-native talkers. We frame this question by addressing the observation that not all “difficult” listening conditions provide equal challenges. Given this, we ask how cognitive and social factors impact perception of unfamiliar accents and ask what our psycholinguistic measurements are capturing. We close by making recommendations for future work. We propose that the issue is less with the terminology of native versus non-native, but rather how our unexamined biases affect the methodological assumptions that we make. We propose that we can use the existing dichotomy to create research programs that focus on teaching perceivers to better understand talkers more generally. Finally, we call on perceivers and researchers alike to question the idea of speech being “native,” “non-native,” “unfamiliar,” and “accented” to better align with reality as opposed to our inherently biased views.

The adverbial suffix -ly₁ and the adjectival suffix -ly₂ typically do not combine (e.g., *ghost+ly₂+ly₁; 'in a ghostlike manner'). However, phonologically similar strings are attested when one /li/ string is part of the word stem (jollily, compared to: ?smellily, *lovelily). Does morphological structure modulate the acceptability of these words independently from the impact of phonological or usage-based constraints? In two experiments, jolly-type stems are rated more acceptable than smell- and love-type stems, which did not significantly differ from each other. A combination of phonological constraints and increased morphological complexity can account for the observed pattern.