Effects of Priming and Work Relationship on Linguistic Alignment in Computer-mediated Communication and Human-computer Interaction

People engaged in a conversation tend to express themselves in similar ways by using comparable or identical words, phrases, sentence structures, accent, speech rate, etc. This process and end results are termed "linguistic alignment, " and have also been observed in both computer-mediated communication (CMC) and human-computer interaction (HCI). Many researchers have demonstrated that linguistic alignment can be easily induced through priming, while others focus on the social aspect of linguistic alignment. Moreover, previous research work on linguistic alignment mostly focused on conversation within dyads. In this dissertation, I report two experimental studies that, in the context of a triadic conference chat setting, investigated the co-presence of alignment as a result of priming and alignment attributable to difference in work relationship (cooperation vs. competition). Similarities and differences observed in the HCI and CMC conditions were also examined. Results show that priming is a strong predictor of alignment even when interlocutors do not directly communicate with each other, but work relationship between interlocutors and communication type (i.e., HCI vs. CMC) could also sway the degree of alignment. Additionally, the priming effect on certain stylistic dimensions (e.g., vocabulary complexity) lasted relatively longer than the effect on other features (e.g., capitalization). As a whole, the dissertation proposes a holistic way of examining and understanding linguistic alignment, and offers researchers a new methodology utilizing realistic user contexts and tasks to study human language behaviors in general and those specific to HCI and CMC.