It?s Not You, It?s Me: Some Speakers Elicit Structural Priming More Reliably Than Others

Linguistic convergence ??? the alignment of your linguistic choices with those of your conversation partner ??? is a well-known phenomenon. An unresolved question about linguistic convergence concerns whether there are individual differences in convergence. Do some people converge with their partner more reliably than others, and do some people elicit convergence more reliably than others? We explored whether some speakers elicit a type of linguistic convergence known as structural priming more reliably than others. Our experimenters called businesses and asked questions such as, At/What time do you close? We demonstrated a structural priming effect (e.g., participants were more likely to use a preposition in their response when the question contained a preposition). We also found that some speakers elicited stronger priming effects than others, and that this tendency was reliable. Our findings suggest that there are reliable individual differences in the extent to which speakers elicit structural matching from their partners.