Does Syntactic Alignment Effectively Influence How Speakers Are Perceived by Their Conversation Partner?

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.

Examining the factors that affect structural repetition in question answering

We present two experiments that examine structural priming in the single-trial phone-call paradigm introduced by Levelt and Kelter (Cognitive psychology, 14 (1), 78-106, 1982). Experimenters called businesses and asked either What time do you close? or At what time do you close? Participants were more likely to produce a prepositional response (At 7 o'clock vs. 7 o'clock) following a prepositional question than following a non-prepositional question. Experiments 1 and 2 attempted to strengthen the priming effect by having the experimenters engage in a brief interaction with the participant before asking the What time…? question. The interactions did not reliably affect the observed priming effect. An analysis across experiments demonstrated that the priming effect found in this paradigm is generally smaller than the average structural priming effect (as reported in Mahowald, James, Futrell, & Gibson, Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 5-27, 2016), but within the range of the effects that are observed in different structural priming paradigms.

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.

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

This study investigated whether syntactic mimicry leads to prosocial effects and whether any such effects are modulated by personality traits. Participants and a confederate of the experimenters took turns describing simple scenes. Target scenes could be described using either a prepositional object or a double object dative structure and we tested whether the participants mimicked the structure used by the confederate (Experiments 1A and 2A), whether mimicry of the participant's sentence structure (Experiments 1B and 2B) made the participant act in a more prosocial manner, and whether any such effects vary with Big Five traits. Participants displayed significant syntactic mimicry, which was additionally negatively related to levels of Extraversion. Syntactic mimicry did not lead to more prosocial behavior, as gauged by the time spent on an extra task (Experiment 1B). This conclusion was confirmed in Experiment 2B, which used a slight adaptation of the task that prevented a ceiling effect. However, a positive relation between prosocial behavior and levels of Conscientiousness was observed in the mimicry condition, which appeared to invert in the non-mimicry condition. We discuss several potential reasons for the absence of prosocial effects of syntactic mimicry and provide suggestions for future research.

Conversation level syntax similarity metric

The syntax and semantics of human language can illuminate many individual psychological differences and important dimensions of social interaction. Accordingly, psychological and psycholinguistic research has begun incorporating sophisticated representations of semantic content to better understand the connection between word choice and psychological processes. In this work we introduce ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric (CASSIM), a novel method for calculating conversation-level syntax similarity. CASSIM estimates the syntax similarity between conversations by automatically generating syntactical representations of the sentences in conversation, estimating the structural differences between them, and calculating an optimized estimate of the conversation-level syntax similarity. After introducing and explaining this method, we report results from two method validation experiments (Study 1) and conduct a series of analyses with CASSIM to investigate syntax accommodation in social media discourse (Study 2). We run the same experiments using two well-known existing syntactic metrics, LSM and Coh-Metrix, and compare their results to CASSIM. Overall, our results indicate that CASSIM is able to reliably measure syntax similarity and to provide robust evidence of syntax accommodation within social media discourse.

How social opinion influences syntactic processing-An investigation using virtual reality

The extent to which you adapt your grammatical choices to match that of your interlocutor’s (structural priming) can be influenced by the social opinion you have of your interlocutor. However, the direction and reliability of this effect is unclear as different studies have reported seemingly contradictory results. We have operationalized social perception as the ratings of strangeness for different avatars in a virtual reality study. The use of avatars ensured maximal control over the interlocutor’s behaviour and a clear dimension along which to manipulate social perceptions toward this interlocutor. Our results suggest an inverted U-shaped curve in structural priming magnitude for passives as a function of strangeness: the participants showed the largest priming effects for the intermediately strange, with a decrease when interacting with the least- or most-strange avatars. The relationship between social perception and priming magnitude may thus be non-linear. There seems to be a 'happy medium' in strangeness, evoking the largest priming effect. We did not find a significant interaction of priming magnitude with any social perception.