About

Seth Wiener, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. He teaches courses on linguistics, data analysis, and Chinese studies. His teaching philosophy emphasizes maximizing the potential of students both as scholars and human beings. Seth Wiener conducts experimental research in linguistics, collaborating with a team of dedicated and kind colleagues. He leads the Language Acquisition, Processing, and Pedagogy (LAPP) Lab, which focuses on experimental linguistics research. In addition to his academic and research roles, he serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Language Learning. He is committed to mentoring and training curious thinkers, fostering their development in both scholarly and personal dimensions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Mathematics
• Speech recognition
• Multimedia
• Data science
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Econometrics
• Audiology
• Medicine
• Communication
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Can dumplings interfere with sleep in a cocktail party? Processing multi-talker speech in auditory word recognition

  Arabixiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-27

  other1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• An exploratory eye-tracking study on the time course of sarcastic speech recognition

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-16

  otherSenior author

  This exploratory study examined how the prosodic characteristics of sincere and sarcastic speech are integrated in real time to understand a speaker’s intended meaning. Participants heard a speaker produce a statement (“The book is interesting”) followed by another speaker produce a response (“It’s so gripping that I can’t believe it was a human who wrote it”). Responses were produced with either sincere or sarcastic prosody following previously published acoustic characteristics. While listening to the speech, participants were shown two AI generated cartoon images depicting the sincere or sarcastic meaning. Participants’ eye movements were recorded and analyzed. Eye-tracking results showed no difference in the timing of looks to the target sarcastic and sincere images. Additionally, the stimuli’s fundamental frequency (F0) and harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR) significantly predicted looks to targets in line with previous studies on the acoustics of sarcastic and sincere speech. These preliminary findings are discussed within the interactive and modular view of sarcasm processing.

  Publisher

• Processing multi-talker speech in a tone language: Dumplings interfere with sleep at a cocktail party

  JASA Express Letters · 2026-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How the dual function of fundamental frequency (F0)-talker separation and word distinction-affects Mandarin word recognition in a cocktail party scenario is investigated. A robust benefit of talker F0 separation is observed: Target recognition was more accurate with different-sex talkers (85%) than same-sex talkers (48%). The effect of word-F0 was modulated by lexical status: Real-word tonal minimal pairs lowered accuracy relative to the baseline (average 4% decrease), whereas nonword tonal minimal pairs did not compromise performance. Thus, tone language listeners leverage talker-F0 differences just as non-tone language listeners do, but the advantage is constrained by the lexical role of F0.

  PublisherDOI

• An exploratory eye-tracking study into the time course of sincere and sarcastic speech recognition

  2026-05-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This exploratory study examined how the prosodic characteristics of sincere and sarcastic speech are integrated in real time to understand a speaker's intended meaning.Participants heard a speaker produce a statement ("The book is interesting") followed by another speaker produce a response ("It's so gripping that I can't believe it was a human who wrote it").Responses were produced with either sincere or sarcastic prosody following previously published acoustic characteristics.While listening to the speech, participants were shown two AI generated cartoon images depicting the sincere or sarcastic meaning.Participants' eye movements were recorded and analyzed.Eye-tracking results showed no difference in the timing of looks to the target sarcastic and sincere images.Additionally, the stimuli's fundamental frequency (F0) and harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR) significantly predicted looks to targets in line with previous studies on the acoustics of sarcastic and sincere speech.These preliminary findings are discussed within the interactive and modular view of sarcasm processing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tonal language experience facilitates pitch perception in L2/3 Japanese

  Journal of Japanese Linguistics · 2026-04-13

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This study tested nine groups of listeners on their discrimination of three pitch accent patterns in Japanese-like nonwords. We performed three analyses on listeners’ pitch discrimination accuracy. The first compared two tonal language-speaking groups (Mandarin and Cantonese), the second involved L1 English groups with tonal or nontonal L2 classroom experience, and the third L2/3 Japanese learners at two proficiency levels. The main finding of the study revealed that speaking a tonal L1 or having learned a tonal language as an L2 facilitates the discrimination of Japanese pitch accent patterns. However, accuracy differences between the two tonal L1 groups were not detected on the discrimination task. In addition, Japanese proficiency only increased perceptual accuracy for L1 tonal speakers. These findings provide further evidence for facilitative transfer of tone experience to the prelexical processing of pitch in an L2/3.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Towards Understanding Ambiguity Resolution in Multimodal Inference of Meaning

  2025-09-16

  articleSenior author

  We investigate a new setting for foreign language learning, where learners infer the meaning of unfamiliar words in a multimodal context of a sentence describing a paired image. We conduct studies with human participants using different image-text pairs. We analyze the features of the data (i.e., images and texts) that make it easier for participants to infer the meaning of a masked or unfamiliar word, and what language backgrounds of the participants correlate with success. We find only some intuitive features have strong correlations with participant performance, prompting the need for further investigating of predictive features for success in these tasks. We also analyze the ability of AI systems to reason about participant performance, and discover promising future directions for improving this reasoning ability.

  PublisherDOI

• Acoustic analysis and perception ratings of first and second language speakers’ Italian lexical stress

  Applied Linguistics · 2025-11-13

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This study examines the acquisition of Italian lexical stress by adult L2 learners. L1 Italian speakers and beginner L2 Italian speakers were recorded reading aloud trisyllabic Italian words, e.g. COdice with antepenultimate syllable stress (“code”), moMENto with penultimate syllable stress (“moment”). We analyzed four acoustic-phonetic cues: duration, fundamental frequency (pitch is the perceptual correlate), amplitude, and spectral tilt (a measure of energy change over frequencies). We corroborated previous findings: L1 speakers used all four cues to differentiate between antepenultimate (strong-weak-weak) and penultimate (weak-strong-weak) stressed words. We found evidence of L2 speakers producing inconsistent patterns for all four cues. We then played these L1 and L2 recordings for L1 Italian speakers (N = 50) and asked them to rate the utterances using a visual analog scale (VAS). As expected, the L1 speech was rated higher (more fluent stress) than the L2 speech (less fluent stress). We modeled how the acoustic cues predicted VAS responses. Our findings highlight the roles of duration and pitch for L2 learners. We conclude with implications for learners and teachers of Italian.

  PublisherDOI

• Correction: Individual differences modulate prediction of Italian words based on lexical stress: a close replication and LASSO extension of Sulpizio and McQueen (2012)

  Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science · 2025-02-24

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Advantageous transfer of general linguistics knowledge

  Open MIND · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Incidental Nonspeech Auditory Learning Scaffolds Phonetic, Category, and Word Learning in a Foreign Language Classroom

  Language Learning · 2025-01-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract There is considerable lab‐based evidence for successful incidental learning, in which a learner's attention is directed away from the to‐be‐learned stimulus and towards another stimulus. In this study, we extend incidental learning research into the language learning classroom. Three groups of adult second language (L2) learners ( N = 52) engaged in structured classroom Mandarin learning took part in an 8‐week study. One group served as a classroom‐only control group. The second group underwent additional intentional auditory training involving Mandarin speech and explicit feedback. The third group underwent additional incidental learning combined with nonspeech “perceptual building block” categories—categories that share critical perceptual dimensions with target L2 speech categories but that are not perceived as speech. We demonstrate that when supplemented with structured classroom learning, incidental learning involving nonspeech analogs promotes phonetic, category, and word learning equivalent to learning from more traditional intentional auditory training.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Carla Contemori

  The University of Texas at El Paso

  102 shared

• Natalia Meir

  Bar-Ilan University

  99 shared

• Miquel Simonet

  University of Arizona

  96 shared

• Amanda Huensch

  University of Pittsburgh

  96 shared

• Flavia Adani

  Freie Universität Berlin

  93 shared

• Rebecca Foote

  University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

  93 shared

• Agnieszka E. Konopka

  King's College Hospital

  93 shared

• Susanne Brouwer

  Radboud University Nijmegen

  90 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  The Ohio State University

• M.A.

  The Ohio State University

• B.A.

  Boston University

Awards & honors

• Simon Initiative Seed Grant, Carnegie Mellon University
• Innovative Models for Undergraduate Research Faculty Fellow,…
• National Institutes of Health Research Grant, 2019
• Language Learning Early Career Research Grant, 2019