Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor

Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor. Laura Staum Casasanto 1 (laura.casasanto@mpi.nl) Kyle Jasmin 1 (kyle.jasmin@mpi.nl) Daniel Casasanto 1,2 (daniel.casasanto@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Neurobiology of Language Group, Nijmegen, NL Donders Center for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Abstract But are immediate social motivations necessary to make speakers accommodate? Or might speakers accommodate even in the absence of a desire to achieve direct interactional goals? Mechanistic theories of dialogue (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) offer one possible alternative. Automatic alignment processes could account for convergence in linguistic behavior. That is, speakers might use similar linguistic forms to those used by their interlocutors because these forms are highly active and thus have an advantage over alternatives in the selection process. On another alternative, accommodation could be a consequence of a speaker’s attempt to achieve longer-term social goals: accommodation could be part of how speakers develop the linguistic styles that they use to communicate social information about themselves to others and to indicate their membership in social groups. This could occur in tandem with or independent of interaction-specific social goals. Distinguishing these alternatives is difficult because in real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous; in any conversation between two real people, the interlocutors may have social goals and relationships that could be influencing their linguistic behavior. Experimenters have attempted to deal with this complexity in a few ways. Experiments using pre-recorded speech in repetition paradigms have uncovered alignment between a speaker and a recording (Babel, 2009). However, because these experiments do not involve conversation, it’s difficult to know whether the same mechanisms underlie speakers’ production in these tasks and their accommodation in conversations. In other experimental paradigms, the conversational setting is retained by using a confederate (Hannah & Murachver, 1999). However, no human confederate can entirely prevent his or her speech from being influenced by the naive participant’s speech. Introducing a confederate means losing experimental control over precisely those social and linguistic variables that might matter the most. This makes it difficult to assess the extent to which accommodation on the part of the participant depends upon their own interactional motivations, and to what extent it is a response to their interlocutor’s behavior. Virtual Reality (VR) provides an opportunity to engage participants in a conversational interaction with an interlocutor whose speech is not influenced by their speech, and can be varied systematically along a single dimension. Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation. Keywords: Conversation; alignment; virtual reality. interaction; accommodation; Introduction Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of multi-party interactions both in the laboratory and in natural conversation have suggested that two or more speakers in a conversation tend to align their linguistic behavior along several dimensions: lexical choice (Barr & Keysar, 2002; Bortfeld & Brennan, 1997; Niederhoffer & Pennebaker, 2002), phonetics (Alim, 2004; Pardo, 2006), and syntactic constructions (Gries, 2005), among others. The fact that accommodation occurs is well accepted, but the motivations for this convergence between speakers have been a matter of debate. Studies of natural conversational interactions have identified social/interactional factors that influence how much speakers accommodate (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973). Based on these studies, it appears that a speaker accommodates towards or away from their interlocutor to achieve interactional goals: to make one’s interlocutor do, think, or feel things. This can involve conveying social information, such as information about their social stances toward their interlocutor or toward a group that their interlocutor belongs to (Coupland, 1985). Accommodation could also help to coordinate joint actions being negotiated through conversation (Brennan & Clark, 1996).