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

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to\neach other's language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles\nand other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in\ntheir partner's immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of\ncoordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such\nas gaining approval or emphasizing difference in status. But has the adaptation\nmechanism become so deeply embedded in the language-generation process as to\nbecome a reflex? We argue that fictional dialogs offer a way to study this\nquestion, since authors create the conversations but don't receive the social\nbenefits (rather, the imagined characters do). Indeed, we find significant\ncoordination across many families of function words in our large movie-script\ncorpus. We also report suggestive preliminary findings on the effects of gender\nand other features; e.g., surprisingly, for articles, on average, characters\nadapt more to females than to males.\n