ALIGNMENT IN DIALOGUE

In many ways unique, what we say in a conversation is not always original: We tend to mirror aspects of the language of our conversation partners such as accent, speech rate, words, and syntactic structure. 

For example, if the person you are conversing with speaks quite quickly, you will be more likely to speed up your own speech. If they talk about their friend's dog as "Ana's Dalmatian", you will be more likely to call it "Dalmatian" too (instead of simply "dog"), and if they mention that they have "sent the professor an email" you will be more likely to say that you have "given your nephew a present" (instead of saying that you have "given a present to  your nephew"). 

This phenomenon, known as alignment (or entrainment), seems to help us understand each other better and the conversation to flow more smoothly. It might result in longer-term learning and ultimately drive language change. 

Alignment could happen because of automatic priming (a mental representation is activated because of recent exposure, making it more likely to be subsequently selected for production), or a top-down decision to engage in audience design (you may use the same language as your conversation partner because you are not sure if they will understand anything else, or because not using their language  might feel like you are disagreeing with them), or a (not necessarily conscious) desire for affiliation or disaffiliation (for example, you wouldn't mimic the foreign accent of a non-native speaker of your language). 

But there are many open questions. How do these different mechanisms play together to determine alignment behavior? What aspects of a situation and linguistic context make a speaker more versus less likely to align? How much of alignment is automatic, and in what situations is it more likely to be so? Is there a difference between acoustic-phonetic alignment (involving a graded adjustment to speech sounds) and lexical and structural alignment (involving a binary choice)? How does alignment work in the two languages of bilinguals? Is there something really different between alignment in a conversation, and mimicking language in the absence of a conversation partner (for structure, known as  syntactic priming)? How does coordination of eye-gaze behavior, gestures and body language play together with linguistic alignment?

Projects in progress:

• Role of attention for alignment to filler words ("like")

• Does alignment make speaking easier? (manuscript in preparation)

• For which parts of speech is lexical alignment most common? Analysis of alignment in a corpus of spontaneous speech (with Lotte Eijk and Aurelie Pistono)

• Do we align to disfluencies in speech? (with Ruth Corps and Franzisca Schulz, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

• The influence of foreign accent on structural alignment (manuscript in prepararion)

• Lexical alignment in the two languages of bilinguals (manuscript in preparation)

• How does alignment drive language change? (With Renata Engels, Ghent University)

Relevant publications:

Ivanova, I., Branigan, H. P., McLean, J.F., Costa, A., & Pickering, M.J. (2021). Lexical alignment to non-native speakers. Dialogue and Discourse, 12(2), 145-173.

Ivanova, I., Horton, W. S., Swets, B., Kleinman, D., & Ferreira, V.S. (2020). Structural alignment in dialogue and monologue (and what attention may have to do with it). Journal of Memory and Language, 110, 104052. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104052

Ivanova, I., Wardlow, L., Warker, J., & Ferreira, V.S. (2017). The effect of anomalous utterances on language production.Memory & Cognition, 45(2), 308-319.

Ivanova, I., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F., Costa, A., & Pickering, M.J. (2017). Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(2), 175-189.

Ivanova, I., Pickering, M.J., McLean, J.F., Costa, A., & Branigan, H.P. (2012). How do people produce ungrammatical utterances? Journal of Memory and Language, 67, 355-370.

Ivanova, I., Pickering, M.J., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F., & Costa, A. (2012). The comprehension of anomalous sentences: Evidence from structural priming. Cognition, 122, 193-209.