Stronger Syntactic Alignment in the Presence of an Interlocutor.

Lotte Schoot,Peter Hagoort,Katrien Segaert

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00685

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Conversation partners influence each other’s linguistic choices
The effect of syntactic priming was present across all groups, it was stronger for participants in the Interlocutor conditions than for participants in the No Interlocutor conditions, as evidenced by a significant Partner ∗ Prime Structure interaction (p < 0.026, Table 1)
Half of the participants in the interlocutor condition and in the no-interlocutor condition were paired with a “partner” who repeated their syntactic choices back to them and the other half was presented with a partner who was not “primed” by the participant

Summary

Introduction

Conversation partners influence each other’s linguistic choices. What you hear as a listener in one conversation turn influences what you say as speaker in the (and vice versa). Explanations of the cognitive mechanisms influencing syntactic priming effects have been provided by accounts that focus on implicit learning mechanisms (Chang et al, 2000, 2006; Jaeger and Snider, 2013), residual activation (Pickering and Branigan, 1998) or a combination of these (Reitter et al, 2011). Despite differences, these influential accounts share a focus on explaining how linguistic context influences syntactic choice

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion