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Speakers Align With Their Partner's Overspecification During Interaction.

Jia E Loy1, Kenny Smith2

  • 1Language Science and Technology, Saarland University.

Cognitive Science
|December 16, 2021
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Speakers adapt their language to match their partners, either overspecifying or minimally specifying descriptions. This linguistic alignment increases during interactions and adjusts to partner behavior changes.

Keywords:
AlignmentInteractionOverspecificationReference production

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Speakers often use overspecified descriptions, providing more information than necessary.
  • The influence of a conversational partner's linguistic behavior on this tendency is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how a partner's tendency to overspecify or minimally specify affects a speaker's own language production.
  • To examine the temporal dynamics and adaptability of linguistic alignment in conversation.

Main Methods:

  • A director-matcher task was employed, where participants interacted with partners exhibiting consistent or changing overspecification behaviors.
  • Experiments manipulated the partner's linguistic strategy (overspecifying vs. minimally specifying).
  • Time-course analyses tracked changes in speaker behavior over the interaction.

Main Results:

  • Speakers aligned their level of specificity (overspecifying or minimally specifying) with their partner's behavior.
  • Linguistic alignment increased progressively throughout the interaction.
  • Speakers demonstrated adaptability, adjusting their strategy when the partner's behavior shifted.

Conclusions:

  • A partner's linguistic behavior significantly influences a speaker's tendency to overspecify or minimally specify.
  • Linguistic alignment is a dynamic process that persists and adapts over the course of an interaction.
  • These findings highlight the continuous impact of social interaction on language production.