LLS Colloquium: "Linguistic and social drivers of structural convergence in dialogue"

On Wednesday 20th October 2021, Christina Kim (University of Kent) will be presenting on linguistic and social drivers of structural convergence in dialogue. 

Linguistic and social drivers of structural convergence in dialogue

Evidence from phonetic imitation studies has shown that listeners adapt their speech to be more similar to that of a speaker they have prior exposure to (Goldinger 1998; Namy, et al. 2002). Furthermore, the extent of convergence appears to be modulated by listeners’ perceptions of speaker characteristics such as the attractiveness of their voice, or the typicality of their accent (Babel, et al. 2014). The current study extends the logic of this work to the structural domain, asking whether listeners’ adaptation of syntactic forms they produce depends on their perceptions about their interlocutor’s social proximity and linguistic competence.

We use structural priming (Bock 1986; Pickering & Branigan 1998) as a measure of listeners’ convergence with their interlocutor. Structural priming has been a useful tool for probing abstract syntactic representations in large part due to its implicit nature (Bock & Griffin 2000), which has led some researchers to liken it to procedural learning (Chang, et al. 2000). I will present a set of experiments comparing priming in conversations between (i) pairs of native speakers of British English, (ii) native and non-native speakers, and (iii) native speakers of different varieties of English (British and North American; Lancashire and South East), to assess to what extent interlocutor characteristics influence convergence or divergence of syntactic forms in dialogue. Our findings suggest that rates of structural convergence depend both on a speaker’s pre-existing structural bias for a particular verb, and their perception of social proximity to their interlocutor. This suggests an interplay between low-level, automatic mechanisms underlying structural convergence and higher-level beliefs about how interlocutors are socially situated with respect to each other.

Event Poster: Linguistic and social drivers of structural convergence in dialogue

The talk will take place at 4pm on Zoom, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end - you can join using this link.