Chameleons in imagined conversations: A new approach to understanding coordination of linguistic style in dialogs

Understand

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner's immediately preceding utterance.

• This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status.
• But has the adaptation mechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to become a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this question, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social benefits (rather, the imagined characters do).
• Indeed, we find significant coordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script corpus.