Nativeness, Social Distance and Structural Convergence in Dialogue

This study extends the logic of prior studies showing phonetic convergence between interlocutors to the structural domain. We ask whether listeners’ adaptation of the syntactic forms they produce depends on their perceptions about their interlocutor’s social proximity and linguistic competence, using structural priming as a measure of convergence. Two experiments compared structural priming in dialogues between native British English speakers and (i) other native British English speakers, (ii) native speakers of North American English, and (iii) non-native speakers of English, to assess to what extent interlocutor characteristics influence structural convergence in dialogue. Our findings suggest that rates of structural convergence depend both on a speaker’s pre-existing structural biases for particular verbs, and their perception of (linguistic or social) similarity to their interlocutor. This suggests that low-level mechanisms underlying structural convergence may be mediated by beliefs about how interlocutors are socially situated with respect to each other.