Studying Conversational Adjustments in Interaction: Beyond Acoustic Phonetic Changes

Area of Science:

• Linguistic complexity
• Interactional linguistics
• Second language acquisition

Background:

• Investigating language complexity in interactive settings is crucial for understanding communication dynamics.
• Previous research has focused on acoustic-phonetic features, but higher-level properties remain less explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine which complexity measures are most informative for analyzing interactive language.
• To investigate whether native and nonnative speakers adapt their language production based on their interlocutor's background.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of spoken English from the Wildcat Corpus using the Diapix task.
• Comparison of language production at dyad and individual levels across native-native, native-nonnative, and nonnative-nonnative pairs.

Main Results:

• Native speakers produced longer, more complex sentences with fewer pauses and mazes compared to nonnative speakers.
• No significant modification of language production was observed based on the interlocutor's language background.

Conclusions:

• Language production complexity is primarily influenced by the speaker's own language background, not their partner's.
• The study highlights the utility of complexity measures for analyzing dialogue and syntactic features in spoken interaction.