Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters.

Speakers' lexical choices are affected by interpersonal-level influences, like a tendency to reuse an interlocutor's words. Here, we examined how those choices are additionally affected by community-level factors, like whether the interlocutor is from their own or another speech community (in-community vs. out-community partner), and how such interpersonal experiences contribute to the acquisition of community-level linguistic knowledge. Our three experiments tested (i) how speakers' lexical choices varied depending on their partner's choices and speech community, and (ii) how speakers' extrapolation of these choices to a subsequent partner was influenced by their partners' speech communities. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants played two sessions of an online picture-matching-and-naming task, encountering the same pictures but different confederates in each session. The first confederate was either an in-community partner (Spanish) or an out-community partner (Latin American); the second confederate was either from the same community as the first confederate or not. Participants' referential choices in Session 1 were influenced by their partner's choices, but not by their community. However, participants' likelihood to subsequently maintain these choices was affected by their partners' communities. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern in Mexicans, and Experiment 3 confirmed that these results were driven by confederates' communities, rather than perceived linguistic status. Our results suggest that speakers encode speech community information during dialogue and store it to inform future contexts of language use, even when it has not affected their choices during that particular encounter. Thus, speakers learn community-level knowledge by extrapolating linguistic information from interpersonal-level experiences.

Lexical entrainment reflects a stable individual trait: Implications for individual differences in language processing.

Language use is intrinsically variable, such that the words we use vary widely across speakers and communicative situations. For instance, we can call the same entity refrigerator or fridge. However, attempts to understand individual differences in how we process language have made surprisingly little progress, perhaps because most psycholinguistic instruments are better-suited to experimental comparisons than differential analyses. In particular, investigations of individual differences require instruments that have high test-retest reliability, such that they consistently distinguish between individuals across measurement sessions. Here, we established the reliability of an instrument measuring lexical entrainment, or the tendency to use a name that a partner has used before (e.g., using refrigerator after a partner used refrigerator), which is a key phenomenon for the psycholinguistics of dialogue. Online participants completed two sessions of a picture matching-and-naming task, using different pictures and different (scripted) partners in each session. Entrainment was measured as the proportion of trials on which participants followed their partner in using a low-frequency name, and we assessed reliability by comparing entrainment scores across sessions. The estimated reliability was substantial, both when sessions were separated by minutes and when sessions were a week apart. These results suggest that our instrument is well-suited for differential analyses, opening new avenues for understanding language variability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).