Structural Priming in Dialogues between Native and Non-native Speakers

This study extends the logic of prior studies showing phonetic convergence between speakers in dialogue 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 convergence. Three experiments compared structural priming in conversations between (i) pairs of native speakers of British English, (ii) native and non-native speakers, and (iii) native speakers of different varieties of English (British and North American; Lancashire and South East), to assess to what extent interlocutor characteristics influence convergence or divergence of syntactic forms in dialogue. Our findings suggest that rates of structural convergence depend both on a speaker’s pre-existing structural bias for a particular verb, and their perception of (linguistic or social) similarity to their interlocutor. This suggests an interplay between low-level, automatic mechanisms underlying structural convergence and higher-level reasoning about how interlocutors are socially situated with respect to each other.