If I see what you see, do I say what you say? Assessing the relationship between perspective-taking and linguistic alignment in monolingual and bilingual speakers

Abstract

Although syntactic priming is often studied in a purely cognitive framework, individual differences in rates of syntactic priming may be related to other social-cognitive and sociolinguistic factors. One such factor may be perspective-taking, in that the ability to take into account the thoughts and feelings of another person may relate to individual differences in the frequency of syntactic priming. To date, however, the limited research investigating this question has used non-interactive measures of perspective-taking in which participants self-report their perspective-taking tendencies or reason about third-party characters. To address this gap, participants in the present study will complete three different perspective-taking tasks, and we will examine whether individual differences in perspective-taking relate to syntactic priming rates during an interactive task. Given some evidence that perspective-taking scores are higher in bilingual versus monolingual individuals, we will also estimate perspective-taking scores and rates of syntactic priming based on participants’ multilingualism scores. Analyzing whether and how perspective-taking and multilingualism relate to variability in rates of structural priming will help inform our understanding of the social-cognitive mechanisms that contribute to linguistic alignment.