Language Style Matching in Preschooler–Adult Dyads: Associations with Dyad Familiarity and Children’s Age

Abstract

Language style matching (LSM) offers promise as an unobtrusive measure of synchrony between members of conversational dyads, but no studies have explored key questions related to LSM in developmental context. We examined LSM in young children’s ( N = 87, Mage = 54.63 months) interactions with caregivers versus experimenters, and evaluated links between LSM and expressive vocabulary. LSM was significantly higher among caregiver–child than experimenter–child dyads and was positively associated with children’s expressive vocabulary.

Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non‐WEIRD Adult–Child Interactions

“…We also investigated whether lexical alignment is influenced by conversational partners and observed no difference in the degree of lexical alignment exhibited by the children when interacting with their parents relative to an unfamiliar university student. These findings contrast with previous findings in which younger children (i.e., aged 5 years and below) exhibited more alignment with familiar than unfamiliar partners (e.g., Borelli et al., 2019; Ostashchenko, Deliens, Geelhand, Bertels, & Kissine, 2019; Strapp & Federico, 2000). While there are several potential reasons for these differences, it is possible that, as children get older and are exposed to a wider social circle, they may learn to adapt to the linguistic patterns of the broader community, such as teachers, friends, or strangers, more generally than their primary caregivers.…”

“…These studies have been conducted in various conversational settings, such as the home environment (Clark, 2007) and the research laboratory (Schwab & Lew‐Williams, 2016). Additionally, a diverse range of tasks, including toy play (Foushee et al., 2022), interactive games (Leung, Tunkel, & Yurovsky, 2021), and spontaneous conversation (Borelli, Klemfuss, & Hollas, 2019), has been used. Further, children have engaged in interactions with conversational partners who are both familiar (Kunert et al., 2011) and unfamiliar (Girolametto & Weitzman, 2002) to them.…”

“…In addition to the conversation task, differences between one's partners may also influence the degree of lexical alignment. For example, some studies have found that adults and preschool children align more with familiar partners (i.e., spouse, caregivers, sibling, and close friends) than with unfamiliar partners (e.g., Borelli et al., 2019; Menshikova, Kocharov, & Kachkovskaia, 2021; Weise, Silber‐Varod, Lerner, Hirschberg, & Levitan, 2021). Whether the type of partner functionally constrains alignment patterns in school‐aged children and adults remains unknown.…”

Parent–toddler play talk: Toddler speech is differentially associated with paternal and maternal speech in interaction

“…Misiek et al (2020) report 'robust evidence of children's ability to engage in multi-level linguistic alignment to adult speech from two years old ' (p. 56). Corpora studies have found child-adult language matching on levels of complexity (Dale & Spivey, 2006;Kunert et al, 2011) and function words (Borelli et al, 2019). This coordination may not apply to all parts of language (e.g.…”