Poster E55, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
The cognitive cost of lexical alignment
Cristina Baus1, Alice Foucart1, Albert Cost1;1Center for Brain and Cognition, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Verbal communication requires the tight coordination of two or more interlocutors working together to reach mutual understanding. Despite the frequency and simplicity with which we engage in dialogues, little is known about the neural underpinnings of language processing in interaction (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). One important aspect of verbal communication is namely lexical alignment, which refers to the tendency of interlocutors to use the same lexical choices to refer to objects favoring successful communication (e.g., Brennan & Clark). In an EEG experiment, neural signatures of lexical alignment were explored to determine the cognitive consequences for speaker’s lexical choices. Name agreement was taken as an index of lexical alignment. From MULTIPICT (Duñabeitia et al., 2018), we selected pictures (e.g., COLOGNE) for which two names were used, one more frequently used (60-70% of participants, preferred name: “cologne”) than the other (30-40% of participants, dispreferred name: perfume). Participants were asked to take turns in a joint picture naming task with a “confederate”. The confederate was introduced to the participant at the beginning of the experiment and both were instructed together. The confederate was instructed to ask some clarification questions allowing participants to be familiarized with her voice. This was done to have an ecological interactive setting while experimentally controlled. The participant was indeed alone performing the task and the words the participant heard during the experiment were pre-recorded by the confederate. Emulating turn-taking in dialogue, during the experiment participants had trials in which they had to speak and trials in which they heard the confederate speaking. The confederate named the pictures first by using either preferred or dispreferred names (counterbalanced across and participants). The same pictures were presented a second time and participants were asked to name them. Behavioral and EEG responses for preferred and dispreferred picture’s corresponding words were obtained. Replicating previous studies, a lexical alignment effect was observed, revealing that participants align to their partners by using dispreferred names very rarely used otherwise. At the EEG level, ERPs locked to the onset of the picture presentation showed that pictures whose corresponding names were previously named with a dispreferred named elicited a larger negativity (N2) than those pictures named with a preferred name, and this effect was especially prominent at frontal-central electrodes. Those results revealed that lexical alignment is an important feature of language in interaction. Interlocutors automatically align to the lexical choices or their interlocutors even when mutual understanding is not required. Importantly, our results revealed for the first time that lexical alignment entails a cost for interlocutors, overriding their lexical preferences in favor of communicative success. References: Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 22, 1482–1493. Duñabeitia, J. A., Crepaldi, D., Meyer, A. S., New, B., Pliatsikas, C., Smolka, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2017). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1-24. Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(1), 8-11.
Themes: Language Production, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)