Abstract
One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker) more likely? It has been claimed that syntactic repetition caused by structural priming is ubiquitous in conversation. However, previous work has not tested for general syntactic repetition effects in ordinary conversation independently of lexical repetition. Here we analyse patterns of syntactic repetition in two large corpora of unscripted everyday conversations. Our results show that when lexical repetition is taken into account there is no general tendency for people to repeat their own syntactic constructions. More importantly, people repeat each other's syntactic constructions less than would be expected by chance; i.e., people systematically diverge from one another in their use of syntactic constructions. We conclude that in ordinary conversation the structural priming effects described in the literature are overwhelmed by the need to actively engage with our conversational partners and respond productively to what they say.
Highlights
It is widely reported that people’s behaviour tends to converge during conversation; amongst other things body posture, movements, speech rhythm, speech rate, accent and facial expressions all tend to become more similar [1,2,3]
Structural priming effects are tested in four General Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) of average cross-turn syntactic similarity for each person with Conversation (Real vs. Chance) and Distance (21 to 25 turns from target) as repeated fixed factors and Subjects as a random intercept
Note that the overall levels of syntactic match are lower for the BNC because of the greater variety of parse trees generated by the Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parser
Summary
It is widely reported that people’s behaviour tends to converge during conversation; amongst other things body posture, movements, speech rhythm, speech rate, accent and facial expressions all tend to become more similar [1,2,3]. Accounts of these phenomena emphasised the role of strategic social processes in promoting convergence [2]. More recent theories have proposed that convergence can be explained in terms of automatic, cross-person priming mechanisms [4,5,6]. One source of concern is that, unlike conventional priming effects, social priming often appeals to activation of high level mental representations and involves effects that persist over relatively long time-scales and across different contexts e.g. reading words associated with being old as a prime for ‘older’ patterns of walking several minutes later
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