We introduce the pair of special issues of Applied Psycolinguistics (this issue, next issue) titled “Towards a just and equitable applied psycholinguistics.” This paper motivates the need for this project, details the editorial process, and provides a brief summary of each article appearing in the special issues.

Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more just applied psycholinguistics requires researchers to explicitly consider the role of power in language, how power shapes fields’ notions of what research questions are important and meaningful, and therefore how research data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated. We argue that psycholinguists should widely adopt approaches to studying linguistic processing in ways which acknowledge the role of social ideologies in shaping their outcome, and which reckon with how asymmetrical power relations shape the perception, acquisition, and judgment of both social and linguistic variation. We conclude with a series of guidelines intended to promote characterizations of social and linguistic diversity which accurately reflect the importance of power differentials and which engage ethically with sociopolitical goals of justice and equity.

This paper describes a perception experiment with L1 Polish and L1 English listeners on the affrication of initial English /tr/ and /dr/ (TR) consonant clusters. The goal was to test phonological predictions formulated within the Onset Prominence (OP) framework. OP offers two distinct structural configurations for representing rising sonority onset clusters. One predicts synchronous cluster articulation in English, giving rise to affrication, while the other predicts asynchronous cluster articulation in Polish. Two groups of listeners performed a two-alternative forced choice identification task on stimuli that included affricated clusters, unaffricated clusters, affricates, and CəC-initial words. For L1 English listeners, the unaffricated cluster-initial items induced the slowest responses. For L1 Polish listeners, the lack of affrication facilitated cluster identification, while the CəC-initial words induced the slowed responses. The results suggest cross-language interaction by which Polish listeners equate L1 unaffricated clusters with L2 CəC-initial words, in accordance with the OP proposal.