Automatic and strategic components of bilingual lexical alignment

Second-language speakers are more likely to strategically reuse the words of their conversation partners (Zhang & Nicol, 2022). This study investigates if this is also the case for lower-proficiency bilinguals from a bilingual community, who use language more implicitly, and if there is more alignment with lower than with higher proficiency, provided the words to be aligned to are all highly familiar. In two experiments, Spanish-English bilinguals took turns with a confederate to name and match pictures in Spanish. The confederate named critical pictures with a dispreferred but acceptable name (e.g., agua [Sp. water] for a picture of rain). In Experiment 1, bilinguals were more likely to name critical pictures with dispreferred names after hearing these names from the confederate than after the confederate named an unrelated picture instead (i.e., an alignment effect). In support of our hypothesis, there was more alignment in lower-proficiency speakers. In Experiment 2, designed to reduce the possibility for strategic alignment, only confederates but not participants performed the matching task, which precluded participants from linking the dispreferred names with a referent, and removed the incentive to pay attention to the confederate's names. As a result, alignment was reduced (though still present). Of most interest, the reduction was greater for lower-proficiency speakers, supporting the hypothesis that strategic lexical-referential alignment is more likely with lower proficiency even for bilinguals from a bilingual community. The study also isolates measurable strategic and automatic components of lexical-referential alignment.