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

Abstract

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from a non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

CHICA: A Developmental Corpus of Child-Caregiver's Face-to-face vs. Video Call Conversations in Middle Childhood

“…Researchers have identified and studied a variety of skills that play an essential role in adult conversations. These are, therefore, skills that children are supposed to learn so as to achieve adult-level mastery, including -among other things -abilities to manage turn-taking (Levinson, 2016;Casillas et al, 2016;Nguyen et al, 2022), listener's feedback (Bavelas et al, 2000;Dingemanse, 2024;Bodur et al, 2023), repair strategies (Purver, 2004;Dingemanse and Enfield, 2024;Clark, 2018), contingent/coherent responses (Grice, 1975;Keenan and Klein, 1975;Bloom et al, 1976;Abbot-Smith et al, 2023) and interactive alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2021;Chieng et al, 2024;Fusaroli et al, 2023;Misiek et al, 2020;Misiek and Fourtassi, 2022).…”

Automatic Coding of Contingency in Child-Caregiver Conversations

“…Children's language development involves not only the acquisition of formal structures such as phonology, syntax, and vocabulary but also the learning of how to use this formal knowledge to communicate with people around them in day-to-day interactions. Becoming a competent conversational partner requires children to master several skills such as turn-taking (Levinson, 2016;Casillas et al, 2016;Agrawal et al, 2023), active listening (Bavelas et al, 2000;Liu et al, 2022), communicative repair (Dingemanse and Enfield, 2024;Clark, 2020;Nikolaus et al, 2022) and interactive alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2004;Chieng et al, 2024;Fusaroli et al, 2023;Misiek et al, 2020;Misiek and Fourtassi, 2022).…”