Socially-mediated syntactic alignment

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWhen we interact with one another, we tend to align our behaviors, including the way we talk. Psycholinguistic work has conceptualized alignment as the result of automatic cognitive mechanisms that operate to facilitate processing and communication. Sociolinguistic work has focused on the role of social identity and interactional strategy in explaining linguistic alignment. We draw on these two largely distinct traditions to investigate socially mediated syntactic alignment with the goal of understanding how social perception and cognition influence the mechanisms involved in alignment. A novel web-based paradigm was employed to collect speech data from a large socially heterogeneous sample. Participants listened to one of three speakers, each with a different accent, deliver an ideologically charged diatribe. Participants then completed a picture description task to assess the degree of syntactic alignment. Finally, participants completed a comprehensive social questionnaire designed to assess a wide range of social dimensions, which were tested as predictors of alignment. Our results suggest that syntactic alignment is to some extent automatic, but socially mediated. We found an overall alignment effect across social conditions and independent of social perceptions. However, the degree of alignment was influenced by a number of factors, including the perceived standardness of the passage speaker's accent, participants' perceived similarity to the speaker, and participants' preference for

Dynamically adapted context-specific hyper-articulation: Feedback from interlocutors affects speakers’ subsequent pronunciations

“…Previous research on pronunciation variation argues that speakers adapt their pronunciations as a function of alignment with interlocutors (e.g., Babel, 2010; Giles et al, 1991; Hay, 2000; Sanchez, Hay, & Nilson, 2015; possibly partly with social goals; for discussion, see Campbell-Kibler, 2010; Foulkes & Hay, 2015; Weatherholtz et al, 2014) or due to, for example, competition processes during lexical planning (Arnold et al, 2012; Baese-Berk & Goldrick, 2009; Kahn & Arnold, 2012; Watson, Buxó-Lugo, & Simmons, 2015; for discussion, see Buz & Jaeger, 2015; Jaeger & Buz, in press). The present results and the studies discussed in the previous section show that feedback from interlocutors also influences pronunciation variation.…”

“…A short demonstration of the paradigm is available at https://www.hlp.rochester.edu/mturk/demos/simpartnerdemo/index.html.. Our lab has successfully used this web-based approach for spoken sentence elicitation (Jaeger & Grimshaw, 2013; Weatherholtz, Campbell-Kibler, & Jaeger, 2014) and speech perception (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2012; Kleinschmidt, Raizada, & Jaeger, 2015). The present paper extends it to the study of phonetic production.…”

How social opinion influences syntactic processing—An investigation using virtual reality

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“…In 2014, Weatherholtz and colleagues [24] conducted a similar experiment, but instead of the binomial “mean” versus “nice” confederate they had participants complete a survey which measured how similar the participants found themselves to their partner, giving a wider spread of ratings. The experiment was conducted online, with participants first hearing a political diatribe after which they were asked to describe 10 simple line drawings.…”

Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non‐native speech

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