The influence of emotion on (the early stages of) speech
production processes, notably content selection has received
little scholarly attention. Goudbeek & Krahmer (2012) found
evidence for alignment at the conceptual level: speakers may
start using a dispreferred attribute over a preferred attribute in
their referring expressions when they are primed by a pre-
recorded female voice in a preceding interaction. The current
study aimed to assess the role of emotion (using amusement
and disgust) in alignment, while simultaneously replicating
this finding in a more naturalistic setting involving two
human participants in naturalistic dialogue. Our results
replicate the findings by Goudbeek & Krahmer (2012),
generalizing their findings to a much more naturalistic setting.
In addition, we found that amused, but not disgusted speakers
tend to use the preferred attribute more to describe objects to
their conversational partner.