Abstract
When people are engaged in social interaction, they can repeat aspects of each other’s communicative behavior, such as words or gestures. This kind of behavioral alignment has been studied across a wide range of disciplines and has been accounted for by diverging theories. In this paper, we review various operationalizations of lexical and gestural alignment. We reveal that scholars have fundamentally different takes on when and how behavior is considered to be aligned, which makes it difficult to compare findings and draw uniform conclusions. Furthermore, we show that scholars tend to focus on one particular dimension of alignment (traditionally, whether two instances of behavior overlap in form), while other dimensions remain understudied. This hampers theory testing and building, which requires a well‐defined account of the factors that are central to or might enhance alignment. To capture the complex nature of alignment, we identify five key dimensions to formalize the relationship between any pair of behavior: time, sequence, meaning, form, and modality. We show how assumptions regarding the underlying mechanism of alignment (placed along the continuum of priming vs. grounding) pattern together with operationalizations in terms of the five dimensions. This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena (including behavior matching, mimicry, entrainment, and accommodation) to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner. The framework also enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment.
Highlights
In social interactions, people coordinate their actions in an effort to incrementally and interactively reach their communicative goals
A key research objective within cognitive science is to gain a fuller understanding of this kind of behavioral alignment and how this can lead to mutual understanding
We benefit from adopting a broad perspective, by considering work on related concepts, such as behavior matching, imitation, mimicry, entrainment, repetition, and accommodation
Summary
People coordinate their actions in an effort to incrementally and interactively reach their communicative goals. In this excerpt, M uses the lexical phrase “meat-eating Chad” along with an iconic co-speech gesture depicting the act of eating. We can identify some form of alignment here in that both participants produce the same lexical phrase (“meateating Chad”) and similar-looking gestures. What we call behavioral alignment here has been studied under a range of terms, and it is part of a larger array of phenomena variously labeled behavior matching, entrainment, accommodation, repetition, imitation, and mimicry Though all of these terms target contingent behavioral similarities in socially interacting agents, each of them comes with its own disciplinary history. We devote special attention to the interrelation of lexical and gestural alignment as one of the promising areas for future studies
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
