Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Communication accommodation is a phenomenon in social in-teractions in which people adjust their language to that of theirinterlocutor. A component of communication accommodationis research on power and dominance relations which suggestslanguage use is dependent on power position. There are differ-ent linguistic markers which imply power standing of people.For example, when high power individuals interact with peoplein low power positions, the language of the interaction tends tofollow the language of the high power individuals. While pre-vious studies have mostly focused on the word-level features,we show that not only people in low power mirror word usageof people in high power, but they also adjust their syntacticstructures to those in high power. Notably, we apply a compu-tational tool on two corpora and show that individuals in lowpower align their syntactic structures to those in high powerwhile people in high power do not.