Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study investigated the degree to which linguistic alignment is affected by communication medium and conversation type. To do so, we took advantage of the pandemic mitigation changes to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by shifting to engage with others over videoconferencing (VC) platforms or to meet face-to-face (FF) with public health constraints. We asked pairs of participants to conduct three conversations in one of three communication media. Here we analyze conversations from 23 dyads: 8 dyads who conversed FF, 8 who conversed in a laboratory VC set-up, and 7 who conversed in a remote VC set-up. Every dyad had an affiliative, an argumentative, and a task-based cooperative conversation. Results showed differences in lexical and syntactic alignment between conversation types. Interestingly, we also found interaction effects. These results point to changes in alignment based on communication constraints and provide support for the interpersonal synergies approach to conversation.