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.

最近的研究无可争议地表明，人的感知影响语言感知。这项研究的大部分内容都基于这样的观念：社会类别是稳定的结构，不同语言社区的成员对这些类别的感知相似。权力差异必然会影响宏观社会学范畴所界定的社会表现的易读性，从而掩盖了这些分类系统中任何客观性的主张。发展更加公正的应用心理语言学需要研究人员明确考虑权力在语言中的作用，权力如何塑造领域对哪些研究问题是重要和有意义的概念，以及如何收集、分析和传播研究数据。我们认为，心理语言学家应该广泛采用研究语言加工的方法，承认社会意识形态在塑造其结果中的作用，并考虑不对称的权力关系如何塑造社会和语言变异的感知、习得和判断。最后，我们提出了一系列旨在促进社会和语言多样性特征的指导方针，这些指导方针准确地反映了权力差异的重要性，并在道德上与正义和公平的社会政治目标相结合。