Multi-Level Linguistic Alignment in a Dynamic Collaborative Problem-Solving Task

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence. Linguistic alignment captures the ways people reuse, that is, "align to," the lexical, syntactic, and semantic forms of others' utterances. Our focus is on the temporal change of multi-level linguistic alignment, as well as how alignment is related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem-solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within a virtual educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade-off of increasing semantic alignment. However, greater semantic alignment does not translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of linguistic coordination within complex and dynamic collaborative problem-solving tasks.

Quo Vadis Forensic Neuropsychological Malingering Determinations? Reply to Drs. Bush, Faust, and Jewsbury

The thoughtful commentaries in this volume of Drs. Bush, Jewsbury, and Faust add to the impact of the two reviews in this volume of statistical and methodological issues in the forensic neuropsychological determination of malingering based on performance and symptom validity tests (PVTs and SVTs). In his commentary, Dr. Bush raises, among others, the important question of whether such malingering determinations can still be considered as meeting the legal Daubert standard which is the basis for neuropsychological expert testimony. Dr. Jewsbury focuses mostly on statistical issues and agrees with two key points of the statistical review: Positive likelihood chaining is not a mathematically tenable method to combine findings of multiple PVTs and SVTs, and the Simple Bayes method is not applicable to malingering determinations. Dr. Faust adds important narrative texture to the implications for forensic neuropsychological practice and points to a need for research into factors other than malingering that may explain PVT and SVT failures. These commentaries put into even sharper focus the serious questions raised in the reviews about the scientific basis of present practices in the forensic neuropsychological determination of malingering.