Divergence in dialogue.

One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker) more likely? It has been claimed that syntactic repetition caused by structural priming is ubiquitous in conversation. However, previous work has not tested for general syntactic repetition effects in ordinary conversation independently of lexical repetition. Here we analyse patterns of syntactic repetition in two large corpora of unscripted everyday conversations. Our results show that when lexical repetition is taken into account there is no general tendency for people to repeat their own syntactic constructions. More importantly, people repeat each other's syntactic constructions less than would be expected by chance; i.e., people systematically diverge from one another in their use of syntactic constructions. We conclude that in ordinary conversation the structural priming effects described in the literature are overwhelmed by the need to actively engage with our conversational partners and respond productively to what they say.

关于人类交流最著名的论断之一是，人们在交谈过程中的行为和语言使用会趋于一致。有人提出，这些模式可以用自动的、跨个体的启动效应来解释。一个关键的测试案例是结构启动：在产出或理解过程中接触到一种句法结构，是否会使（同一说话者或另一个说话者）更有可能再次使用该结构？有人声称，由结构启动导致的句法重复在交谈中无处不在。然而，先前的研究没有在普通交谈中独立于词汇重复来测试一般的句法重复效应。在这里，我们分析了两个大型的日常无脚本对话语料库中的句法重复模式。我们的研究结果表明，当考虑到词汇重复时，人们并没有重复自身句法结构的普遍倾向。更重要的是，人们重复彼此句法结构的频率低于随机预期；也就是说，人们在句法结构的使用上存在系统性的差异。我们得出结论，在普通交谈中，文献中所描述的结构启动效应被与交谈对象积极互动以及对其话语做出有效回应的需求所掩盖。