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Abstract

In conversation, speakers mimic each other’s (linguistic)
behavior. For example, speakers are likely to repeat
each other’s sentence structures: a phenomenon
known as syntactic priming. In a previous fMRI study
(Schoot et al., 2014) we reported that the magnitude
of priming effects is also mimicked between speakers.
Here, we follow-up on that result. Specifically, we test
the hypothesis that in a communicative context, the
priming magnitude of your interlocutor can predict your
own priming magnitude because you have adapted
your individual susceptibility to priming to the other
speaker. 40 participants were divided into 20 pairs who
performed the experiment together. They were asked
to describe photographs to each other. Photographs
depicted two persons performing a transitive action
(e.g. a man hugging a woman). Participants were
instructed to describe the photographs with an active
or a passive sentence depending on the color-coding
of the photograph (stop light paradigm, Menenti et al.,
2011). Syntactic priming effects were measured in speech
onset latencies: a priming effect is found when speakers
are faster to produce sentences with the same structure
as the preceding sentence (i.e. two consecutive actives
or passives) than to produce sentences with a different
structure (active follows passive or vice versa). Before
participants performed the communicative task, we ran
a non-communicative pretest for each participant, to
measure their individual priming effect without influence
of the partner’s priming effect. To test whether speakers
influence each other’s syntactic priming magnitude in
conversation, we ran an rANCOVA with the syntactic
priming effect of each participant’s communicative
partner as a covariate. Results showed that there was
an interaction between this covariate and Syntactic
Repetition (F(1,38) = 435.93, p < 0.001). The more your
partner is primed by you, the more you are primed by
your partner. In a second analysis, we found that the
difference between paired speakers’ individual syntactic
priming effects (as measured in the pretest) predicted
how much speakers adapt their syntactic priming effects
when they are communicating with their partner in the
communicative experiment (ß = -0.467, p < 0.001). That
means that if your partner’s individual susceptibility for
syntactic priming is stronger than yours, you will increase
your own priming magnitude in the communicative
context. On the other hand, if your partner’s individual
susceptibility for syntactic priming is less strong, you
will decrease your priming effect. Furthermore, the
strength of the in-/decrease is proportional to how
different you are from your speaker to begin with. We
interpret the results as follows. Syntactic priming effects
in conversation are said to result from speakers aligning
their syntactic representations by mimicking sentence
structure (Pickering & Garrod, 2004; Jaeger & Snider,
2013). Here we show that on top of that, the magnitude
of syntactic priming effects is also mimicked between
interlocutors. Future research should focus on further
investigation of the neural correlates of this process, for
example with fMRI hyper-scanning. Indeed, our findings
stress the importance of studying language processing in
real, communicative contexts, which is now also possible
in neuroimaging paradigms.