Perspective Alignment in Dialogue: The Role of Interlocutor's Linguistic Competence and Communicative Goals

In dialogue, speakers align with their interlocutors at various linguistic levels and can adjust their utterances in light of their interlocutor’s demographic attributes (e.g., dialectal background) to facilitate communicative success (i.e., interlocutor modelling). This study further investigated whether speakers align with their interlocutor in their perspective of reference (e.g., referring to a person by their occupation or appearance; e.g., a monk or having a bold head). More importantly, we tested whether such perspective alignment, if any, is larger with a linguistically less competent interlocutor (a child interlocutor compared to an adult interlocutor in Experiment 1 and a non-native-speaking interlocutor compared to a native-speaking interlocutor in Experiment 2) and whether perspective alignment is sensitive to whether the participant and the interlocutors were engaged in a communicative task or not. In two experiments, participants carried out a communicative task with an online interlocutor (i.e., they took turns to describe a picture of a person so that the other person could click on the described picture) and a non-communicative task (they took turns to describe pictures without the need for the other person to click on the described picture) in Mandarin Chinese. Results showed that participants demonstrated greater perspective alignment a linguistically less competent interlocutors in both tasks. Such an interlocutor effect was observed in both the communicative and non-communicative tasks, though it was more pronounced in the former than in the latter. These findings support a hybrid model of interlocutor modeling is both goal-directed and implicit: while speakers tailor their utterances in light of their interlocutor’s demographics to boost communicative success, such interlocutor-sensitivity seems to additionally be driven by an implicit mechanism even in the absence of explicit communicative goals.