Misinterpretation of African American English BIN by adult speakers of Standard American English

•Adding stress to BIN indicates the remote past in African American English (AAE).•Standard American English (SAE) marks the remote past with temporal adverbials.•AAE- and SAE-speakers perceive and produce the phonetic features of BIN.•AAE-speakers, but not SAE-speakers, interpret BIN correctly.•Perception and production abilities may not always lead to successful interpretation.

African American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE) share many cognates (forms similar in phonology and function) while differences are often masked by false cognates (forms similar in phonology but different in function). Because false cognates are interpretable via a listener's own variety, this likely impacts performance on language-based tests. This study investigates how adult SAE- (n = 24) and AAE-speakers (n = 24) process BIN, an AAE tense/aspect marker. In AAE, stressing BIN indicates the remote past; when unstressed, been indicates the recent past. Results show that while both AAE- and SAE-speakers can perceive and produce the phonetic cues that differentiate BIN and been, only the AAE-speakers accurately infer that BIN corresponds to the remote past.