When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies haveshown that adaptation also works at the semantic level, with listeners aligning their interpretations of vague expressionssuch as quantifiers to those by a certain speaker. While adaptation has been found to arise by passive exposure to the inter-locutors linguistic representations, we hypothesize that actively seeking information could boost this effect. In particular,asking clarification questions can be helpful to reduce the uncertainty about someone elses interpretation. We focus on thegradable adjectives big and small and show that, in line with previous findings, speakers can align their representations tothose by their interlocutors. Moreover, this effect is boosted when people are given the possibility to ask questions. Thoughparticipants can generally ask for useful information, we observe that this ability improves as the interaction progresses.

In describing images, visual and linguistic processes coordinate with each other and they both proceed in a linear fashion. Three main theories about the nature of the relation between these processes and how they unfold over time have been proposed in the literature of 'linearization'. In this work, we investigate the hypotheses put forward by these theories utilizing a corpus of spoken image descriptions with speakers' eye-movement data. We explore the time alignment between the fixations on objects and the utterance of the corresponding nouns in the data. In contrast to previous studies, this dataset allows us to inspect unrestricted language production in the context of real scenes on a larger scale. We find both confirming and conflicting evidence for each of the theories in question, suggesting that the intricate relation between eye movements and language production may involve mechanisms proposed by all three theories.

Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction. More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.

When we communicate with others, we often repeat aspects of each other's communicative behavior such as sentence structures and words. Such behavioral alignment has been mostly studied for speech or text. Yet, language use is mostly multimodal, flexibly using speech and gestures to convey messages. Here, we explore the use of alignment in speech (words) and co-speech gestures (iconic gestures) in a referential communication task aimed at finding labels for novel objects in interaction. In particular, we investigate how people flexibly use lexical and gestural alignment to create shared labels for novel objects and whether alignment in speech and gesture are related over time. The present study shows that interlocutors establish shared labels multimodally, and alignment in words and iconic gestures are used throughout the interaction. We also show that the amount of lexical alignment positively associates with the amount of gestural alignment over time, suggesting a close relationship between alignment in the vocal and manual modalities.