Lecture | LACG Meetings
Syncing up for a good conversation: Cognitive mechanisms of conversational alignment
- Date
- Monday 26 June 2023
- Time
- Series
- LACG Meetings
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.52 (& Microsoft Teams)
Abstract
People sometimes reuse or approximate parts of each other’s utterances in conversation. Such alignment is theorized to facilitate speaking and contribute to communicative success, conversational quality, and social connection. Alignment is theoretically useful as a window into language and cognitive mechanisms, and has large potential benefits in clinical practice. But there is much we still don’t know: Alignment is likely driven by a number of different mechanisms, ranging from more automatic to more conscious, that are subserved by different brain networks, and are differentially recruited for different linguistic representations and in different contexts of language use. A long-term research program of my lab is to provide evidence towards a comprehensive theory of alignment.
In this talk, I will present alignment research on different aspects of language (content words and discourse particles), with linguistically diverse speakers (Spanish-English bilinguals from El Paso and English monolinguals), different methods (experiments and corpus analysis), and different cognitive demands (navigating through a foreign city in virtual reality). Among other things, I will show evidence that alignment to the discourse particle “like” in American English is sensitive to both frequency of exposure and attention during comprehension, and that lexical-referential alignment does facilitate speaking even when aligning to a word different from the one you normally say.
To join the meeting online, please follow this link. To be added to the LACG group on Teams, please follow this link.