It's Not You, It's Me

Linguistic alignment is a well-documented phenomenon that describes the act of adjusting your speech to match your partner's. This can take various forms – by changing your tone, pitch, speech rate, or even the types of words each speaker uses. Although linguistic alignment is established, the nuances regarding alignment are less so. For example, do some speakers adapt to others more than the general population? Further, are there some people who elicit the adaptations very broadly? The focus of my dissertation was to establish adaptation in naturalistic speech and then explore the factors that affect the alignment. Experimenters in my study called businesses and asked, either At/What time do you close? There are two main findings from this dissertation. First, I demonstrated a structural priming effect (e.g., participants who were asked prepositional questions were more likely to respond using a preposition). Second, some speakers elicited stronger priming (alignment) than others, and this effect was reliable across time. My dissertation suggests individual differences in speakers may exist that can affect linguistic alignment in naturalistic speech.