Revisiting the Phenomenon of Syntactic Complexity Convergence on German Dialogue Data

TL;DR

This study investigates syntactic complexity convergence in German dialogue data, confirming its presence in larger datasets and suggesting potential linguistic generality, with some variations observed across datasets.

Contribution

It extends the concept of syntactic complexity convergence from English to German dialogue data using a modified dependency parsing metric.

Findings

Syntactic complexity convergence confirmed in one German dataset

Larger datasets show stronger convergence evidence

Different types of convergence observed in some datasets

Abstract

We revisit the phenomenon of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction, originally found for English dialogue, which has theoretical implication for dialogical concepts such as mutual understanding. We use a modified metric to quantify syntactic complexity based on dependency parsing. The results show that syntactic complexity convergence can be statistically confirmed in one of three selected German datasets that were analysed. Given that the dataset which shows such convergence is much larger than the other two selected datasets, the empirical results indicate a certain degree of linguistic generality of syntactic complexity convergence in conversational interaction. We also found a different type of syntactic complexity convergence in one of the datasets while further investigation is still necessary.