At first glance, this may seem like a tiny difference in preferences, but it illustrates a much larger trend: We copy each other a lot in daily conversation. As demonstrated above, we often copy words or sentence structures that our conversation partner has used, but we copy other things too, including our partner’s intonation, eye gaze, and hand gestures. 

This kind of repetition in conversation is extremely widespread, raising the question: Why do we do this? Are there any benefits of reusing the same words, sentence structures, and hand gestures as our conversational partner? In this blog, we’ll introduce two ways that copying our conversational partner helps us communicate.

Reusing words and structures facilitates language production

One reason why people reuse each other’s words and sentence structures is because it helps them plan what to say next. For example, research has shown that people name pictures (e.g., a picture of a radio) faster and more accurately after they hear a sentence containing its name (e.g., Unfortunately he has broken the radio) compared to when they hear a sentence containing a different object name. This pattern persists even if there’s a five minute delay between hearing the sentence and naming the picture.

Research has also shown that reusing the same sentence structures allows people to respond faster. For example, if you hear the sentence “The thief sold the collector a painting” and then have to describe the photo below, you’re faster if you say, “The girl gave the dog some ice cream” rather than if you say, “The girl gave some ice cream to the dog”.

Together, these findings suggest that reusing words and sentence structures previously produced by a partner helps people plan what to say, allowing them to respond faster and facilitating communication.

Reusing words and hand gestures enables us to create partner-specific shared expressions

Another function of reusing words is to create and maintain shared expressions with a conversational partner. In conversation, people can establish agreed-upon expressions by repeatedly reusing them. This is illustrated in a classic study by Susan Brennan and Herbert Clark (1996), in which one participant described geometrical figures like the one below to a conversational partner over time:

    (i)         All right, the next one looks like a person who’s ice skating, except they’re sticking two arms out in front.

   (ii)         Um, the next one’s the person ice skating that has two arms?

  (iii)         The fourth one is the person ice skating, with two arms.

  (iv)         The next one’s the ice skater.

First, the speaker describes the figure as “a person who’s ice skating, except they’re sticking two arms out in front”. The term “the person ice skating” is then repeated, and eventually the speaker converges on just “the ice skater” for the rest of the conversation.

In 2011, Judith Holler and Katie Wilkin built on Brennan and Clark’s study to show that not only words but also hand gestures can be part of shared expressions. For example, during one session a participant describing a picture stuck one arm behind them to illustrate the figure. Later, when they were describing that figure again, the participant’s conversational partner made the same gesture to describe the figure even more efficiently. 

More recently, in another description task, Marlou Rasenberg, Aslı Özyürek, Sara Bögels, and Mark Dingemanse showed that the repetition of speech and gesture simultaneously, also known as multimodal alignment, plays a key role in meaning-making. In particular, they found that multimodal repetition is more likely to occur at the beginning of interactions, jumpstarting the development of shared meaning. 

Taken together, these findings suggest that repeating words and hand gestures help us create a partner-specific space of shared meaning. 

So why do we copy each other in conversation? Repeating words, sentence structures, and hand gestures facilitates communication. Next time you have a chat with your friends or family, pay attention to their speech and gestures. You’ll notice that they copy some of your words and gestures, and you probably copy theirs too! 

Turns out, what we say and gesture is sometimes less original than we might have thought.

References

Bartolozzi, F., Jongman, S. R., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). Concurrent speech planning does not eliminate repetition priming from spoken words: Evidence from linguistic dual-tasking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(3), 466–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000944

Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 1482–1493. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.6.1482

Clark, H. H., & Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986). Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22(1), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(86)90010-7

Corley, M., & Scheepers, C. (2002). Syntactic priming in English sentence production: Categorical and latency evidence from an Internet-based study. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(1), 126–131. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196267

Holler, J., & Wilkin, K. (2011). Co-speech gesture mimicry in the process of collaborative referring during face-to-face dialogue. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 35(2), 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0105-6

Levelt, W. J. M., & Kelter, S. (1982). Surface form and memory in question answering. Cognitive Psychology, 14(1), 78–106. 

Rasenberg, M., Özyürek, A., Bögels, S., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). The primacy of multimodal alignment in converging on shared symbols for novel referents. Discourse Processes, 59(3), 209–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2021.1992235

Photo Credits

• Girl with dog: https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/medium-shot-girl-feeding-dog_16688821.htm

• Ice skater: Holler, J., & Wilkin, K. (2011). Co-speech gesture mimicry in the process of collaborative referring during face-to-face dialogue. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 35(2), 133–153. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0105-6