Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs

TL;DR

This paper investigates unconscious linguistic style coordination in dialogues, using fictional movie scripts to understand if such adaptation is a reflex, revealing significant coordination and gender-related effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using fictional dialogues to study linguistic coordination, demonstrating its prevalence and exploring social factors influencing it.

Findings

Significant coordination across multiple function word families in movie scripts

Characters adapt more to females than males for articles

Fictional dialogues reveal unconscious linguistic adaptation mechanisms

Abstract

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social benefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script corpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender and other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters adapt more to females than to males.