Automated and Partner-Specific Factors Influencing Lexical Entrainment

Automated and Partner-Specific Factors Influencing Lexical Entrainment Lisette Mol (l.mol@uvt.nl) Rens Bogers (e.a.j.j.bogers@uvt.nl) Tommy Bouwens (t.j.f.bouwens@uvt.nl) Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), School of Humanities, Tilburg University P.O. Box 90135, NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands Abstract choose their referring expressions based on these factors, they may end up choosing the same references as a result. However, most referents can be referred to in very many ways (Brennan & Clark, 1996). Therefore, these three factors alone are insufficient to explain the (frequent) occurrence of lexical entrainment. Rather, the course of a conversation needs to be taken into account too. Brennan and Clark also propose four factors influencing reference production that are related to the conversation history: recency, frequency of use, provisionality and partner-specificity. The first two factors imply that speakers choose the reference that was used successfully for a certain referent most recently, taking into account the frequency of occurrence as well. That is, if a certain referring expression has repeatedly been used successfully (e.g. 'couch') and then an alternative reference is used successfully only once (e.g. 'sofa'), speakers may still revert to the more frequently used reference afterward. The factors recency and frequency of use together provide an explanation of lexical entrainment. These two factors are compatible with a view that lexical entrainment is based on automated priming (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). In a (partly) connectionist model of cognition (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998; McClelland & Rummelhart, 1986; Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986), both frequency of use and recency affect the availability of chunks of information, such as lexical items. In line with such models, Pickering and Garrod (2004) propose that through the process of automated priming, interlocutors align their linguistic representations, which causes them to produce similar utterances. For example, when hearing a certain reference, linguistic representations are associated with it in the process of interpretation. As a result, the activations of these representations increase, which makes it more likely that they will be used in the process of language production. Therefore, a referent that has been heard frequently or recently is more likely to be produced. This automated account of lexical entrainment, known as the interactive-alignment account, predicts that lexical entrainment will occur whenever speakers are exposed to, and thus primed with, linguistic input. Effects of provisionality and partner-specificity are not necessarily predicted by such an automated account. These Both automated priming (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) and partner-specific adaptation (Brennan & Hanna, 2009) have been proposed to underlie lexical entrainment (the repetition of words across interlocutors). Since activation levels of infrequently used words are relatively low, the effect of automated priming is predicted to be weaker in L2- than in L1-conversations, leaving more room for deliberate partner- specificity (Costa, Pickering, & Sorace, 2008). We tested this prediction by means of a production experiment, in which we varied whether participants interacted in their L1 or L2, and whether they addressed the confederate who had introduced a certain reference or another addressee. We found that in their L2, participants repeated references more frequently when addressing the person who had introduced the reference. Yet we did not find this effect of partner-specificity in the L1 conditions. Therefore, our results support the proposed combination of the two accounts. Keywords: Speech production; alignment; lexical entrainment; interactive-alignment account; conceptual pact Introduction When people interact in dialogue, the referring expressions they use tend to converge (e.g. see Branigan, Pickering, Pearson, & McLean, 2010). For example, if one person refers to a landmark as 'the cathedral', it is likely that a conversation partner would refer to it as such as well, rather than saying 'the church'. This process is known as lexical entrainment (Garrod & Anderson, 1987). Different explanations have been proposed for this observation, either relying on automated processes (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) or on the more deliberate process of grounding (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Clark, 1996). In the current study, we test predictions made by each of these two accounts. Accounts of Lexical Entrainment Lexical entrainment can be measured by comparing the ways in which people refer to objects, locations, times, actions, people, etc. If two interlocutors use the same expressions, they are said to be lexically entrained (Garrod & Anderson, 1987). Brennan and Clark (1996) describe three factors that influence reference production that are independent of a conversation's history: informativeness, lexical availability, and perceptual salience. If all speakers