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

Lotte Schoot,Peter Hagoort,Katrien Segaert,Evelien Heyselaar,Sonja Kotz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0153521

Lotte Schoot, Peter Hagoort + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153521

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Abstract

The way we talk can influence how we are perceived by others. Whereas previous studies have started to explore the influence of social goals on syntactic alignment, in the current study, we additionally investigated whether syntactic alignment effectively influences conversation partners’ perception of the speaker. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which we can measure the effect of social goals on the strength of syntactic alignment for one participant (primed participant), while simultaneously obtaining usable social opinions about them from their conversation partner (the evaluator). In Study 1, participants’ desire to be rated favorably by their partner was manipulated by assigning pairs to a Control (i.e., primed participants did not know they were being evaluated) or Evaluation context (i.e., primed participants knew they were being evaluated). Surprisingly, results showed no significant difference in the strength with which primed participants aligned their syntactic choices with their partners’ choices. In a follow-up study, we used a Directed Evaluation context (i.e., primed participants knew they were being evaluated and were explicitly instructed to make a positive impression). However, again, there was no evidence supporting the hypothesis that participants’ desire to impress their partner influences syntactic alignment. With respect to the influence of syntactic alignment on perceived likeability by the evaluator, a negative relationship was reported in Study 1: the more primed participants aligned their syntactic choices with their partner, the more that partner decreased their likeability rating after the experiment. However, this effect was not replicated in the Directed Evaluation context of Study 2. In other words, our results do not support the conclusion that speakers’ desire to be liked affects how much they align their syntactic choices with their partner, nor is there convincing evidence that there is a reliable relationship between syntactic alignment and perceived likeability.

Highlights

In social interaction, humans tend to imitate their partner’s posture, gestures and mannerisms, without being aware that they do so
We found that the relationship between how much primed participants aligned their syntactic choices with the evaluator's prime structures and the change in how that evaluator evaluated them on the likeability component of our questionnaire before and after the experiment was negative
We argue that it is for this reason that we found a negative relationship between the primed participant's syntactic alignment magnitude and the evaluator's ratings

Summary

Introduction

Humans tend to imitate their partner’s posture, gestures and mannerisms, without being aware that they do so (behavioral mimicry [1]). Speakers imitate low-level linguistic features such as accents [2], speech rate [3] and speech rhythm [4], but they repeat their conversation partner’s lexical [5] and syntactic choices [6]. The latter is called syntactic alignment [7]. Speakers would show stronger syntactic alignment effects when they interact with a partner they like or want to be associated with than when they interact with a partner they do not like or want to distance themselves from [2]

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