Lexical alignment in second language communication: evidence from a picture-naming task

Zhang, Di; Nicol, Janet

doi:10.1080/23273798.2021.2019285

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…We think it is striking that participants aligned no more, or even less, to non-native speakers’ grammatical structures, given that the opposite may occur in speech production . Work in speech production has shown that interlocutors align with each other at different linguistic levels (e.g., temporal phonetic, lexical, syntactic; [ 70 , 71 ] and that this alignment is mediated by social factors, such as the perceptions both of one’s own language proficiency and one’s interlocutor [ 30 , 72 , 73 ], as well as how socially similar they are to one other [ 74 ]. This may reflect an explicit attempt to accommodate non-native speakers to achieve linguistic alignment while engaged in dialogue [ 75 ] and/or to serve social purposes, such as demonstrating liking of an interlocutor (see Communication Accommodation Theory: [ 76 , 77 ]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of priming in grammatical acceptability judgements for native versus non-native speakers: Effects of intelligibility

2022

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Comprehenders frequently need to adapt to linguistic variability between talkers and dialects. Previous research has shown, given repeated exposure to quasi-grammatical structures, comprehenders begin to perceive them as more grammatical (Luka & Barsalou 2005, Luka & Choi 2012). We examined whether grammatical acceptability judgements differ for native versus non-native speech. In an exposure phase, native English speakers listened to, retyped, and rated the grammaticality of quasi-grammatical sentences (e.g., What Emily is thankful for is that she is here) spoken by a native or non-native speaker. In a subsequent test phase, participants rated additional sentences, some of which had the same structure as exposure sentences. Participants rated native-accented sentences as more grammatical, demonstrating a role for talker identity in perceptions of grammaticality. Furthermore, structures previously heard during the exposure phase were rated as more grammatical than novel unprimed structures, but only for the native speaker. Subset analyses suggest this effect is driven by speaker intelligibility, which holds implications for communication between native and non-native speakers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of priming in grammatical acceptability judgements for native versus non-native speakers: Effects of intelligibility

2022

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“…It is widely acknowledged that we consider whom we are talking to and that we tend to mirror certain words and phrases used by our conversational partners. This so-called lexical entrainment for labeling objects (e.g., Garrod and Anderson, 1987) as well as later adjustments of such labels for new conversational partners (e.g., Brennan and Clark, 1996) has been found in conversations involving native interlocutors and non-native interlocutors alike (e.g., Bortfeld and Brennan, 1997;Zhang and Nicol, 2022), suggesting that both groups of speakers adapt actively to contextual information about their conversational partners. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) argued that whether an utterance reflects partner-specific considerations mainly depends on the availability of suitable memory representations as input for the production process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Who said it? Native and non-native listeners' source memory for object-speaker associations

Beck,

Weber

2024

Front. Lang. Sci.

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Memory for who said what can help native and non-native listeners identify critical information for use in conversations. In two experiments, source memory for object-speaker associations was tested for listeners varying in language proficiency. Native and non-native participants of English first heard speakers name objects with prototypical color (e.g., broccoli) before they had to indicate who had previously named each object. Speakers either consistently named objects of one color, or they randomly named objects of different colors. While both listener groups associated objects with speakers successfully, in Experiment 1, with black and white images, native listeners showed an advantage in source memory in the color consistent condition over the random condition, while non-native listeners had no such advantage. The finding for non-native listeners was replicated in Experiment 2 with color images. The results confirm the role of source memory representations in communication, but also suggest that encoding object-speaker association in L2 may be less sensitive to consistent patterns in the input.

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On bilingualism and alignment

Williams,

Ferreira,

Ivanova

2023

Bilingual Processing and Acquisition

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This chapter is dedicated to the contribution of the theoretical review of Costa, Pickering, and Sorace (2008) to our understanding of alignment in second-language dialogue, or, more broadly, conversations involving at least one less proficient speaker. We first briefly describe the review’s foundation, the Interactive Alignment Account, and some of its theoretical considerations. We then highlight the main hypotheses put forward by Costa et al. (2008), following each with subsequently obtained relevant evidence. As proposed by these authors, the emerging picture is indeed one in which second-language dialogue is characterized by enhanced non-automatic alignment and, in some cases, reduced automatic alignment, with important roles of audience design, second-language proficiency, and modeling behavior. While recent advances have been made in this area, some of Costa et al.’s (2008) hypotheses have not been tested, and some have produced conflicting evidence; we thus end with a list of research questions aimed to inspire future work on this topic.

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Lexical alignment in second language communication: evidence from a picture-naming task

Cited by 4 publications

References 39 publications

The role of priming in grammatical acceptability judgements for native versus non-native speakers: Effects of intelligibility

The role of priming in grammatical acceptability judgements for native versus non-native speakers: Effects of intelligibility

Who said it? Native and non-native listeners' source memory for object-speaker associations

On bilingualism and alignment

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