Perspective alignment in dialogue: The role of interlocutor's linguistic competence and communicative goals

In dialogue, speakers tend to align linguistic expressions with those by their interlocutor; such linguistic alignment is adjusted in light of their interlocutor's demographic attributes (e.g., more alignment with a non-native than a native interlocutor) in order to facilitate communicative success (a phenomenon known as interlocutor modelling). This study investigated whether speakers align with their interlocutor in their perspective of reference (e.g., referring to a person as a doctor in terms of their occupation or wearing a white coat in terms of the appearance) in Mandarin Chinese. More importantly, we further examined two hypotheses regarding such perspective alignment (if any). First, we tested whether perspective alignment is larger with a linguistically less competent interlocutor (a child interlocutor compared to an adult interlocutor in Experiment 1; a non-native-speaking interlocutor compared to a native-speaking interlocutor in Experiment 2). Second, we tested whether perspective alignment is further modulated by the nature of interaction between participants and their interlocutor: In a communicative task, participants took turns to describe a picture of a person so that their interlocutor could click on the described picture, while in a non-communicative task, participants and their interlocutor took turns to describe pictures without the need for the other person to click on the described picture (crucially, participants were informed that their interlocutor could not hear them due to a technical failure). We found that participants demonstrated greater perspective alignment with 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 suggest that interlocutor modelling during conceptualization involves both strategic and implicit components. While speakers adjust their utterances based on their interlocutor's demographics to enhance communicative success, such interlocutor-specific adaptations may also be guided by mechanisms operating below conscious awareness, even in the absence of explicit communicative goals.