Syntactic chameleons: Are there individual differences in syntactic mimicry and its possible prosocial effects?

Does it pay to imitate? No evidence for social gains from lexical imitation

According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Crucially, and unknown to participants, the partner was in fact a computer program which in one group produced the same names as previously used by the participant, and in the other group consistently produced different names. We found no difference in how the two groups evaluated the partner or the interaction and no difference in their willingness to cooperate with the partner. In Experiment 2, we made the task more similar to natural interactions by adding a stage in which a participant and the partner introduced themselves to each other and included a measure of the participant's autistic traits. Once again, we found no effects of being imitated. We discuss how these null results may inform imitation research.

Structural alignment and its prosocial effects in first and second languages

The present study examined structural alignment (prepositional object dative and double object dative) and its prosocial effects in Spanish-English bilinguals (English L2) and native English speakers (English L1). A scripted picture description paradigm in which a confederate and participant alternately described pictures was used. L1 and L2 speakers of English displayed comparable levels of structural alignment. In a second phase of the experiment we show that after being exposed to structural alignment by the confederate, L1 but not L2 participants displayed an increase in prosocial behavior as reflected by the time they were willing to help with an extra task. Possible explanations and implications are then discussed.

Stronger Syntactic Alignment in the Presence of an Interlocutor

Speakers are influenced by the linguistic context: hearing one syntactic alternative leads to an increased chance that the speaker will repeat this structure in the subsequent utterance (i.e., syntactic priming, or structural persistence). Top-down influences, such as whether a conversation partner (or, interlocutor) is present, may modulate the degree to which syntactic priming occurs. In the current study, we indeed show that the magnitude of syntactic alignment increases when speakers are interacting with an interlocutor as opposed to doing the experiment alone. The structural persistence effect for passive sentences is stronger in the presence of an interlocutor than when no interlocutor is present (i.e., when the participant is primed by a recording). We did not find evidence, however, that a speaker's syntactic priming magnitude is influenced by the degree of their conversation partner's priming magnitude. Together, these results support a mediated account of syntactic priming, in which syntactic choices are not only affected by preceding linguistic input, but also by top-down influences, such as the speakers' communicative intent.