Quantifying Categorical and Conceptual Convergence in Child-Adult Dialogue

Using corpus-based methods inspired by recurrence quantification analysis, we investigate the patterns that shape coordination in dialogue, in particular during the process of language acquisition. We show that the turn-by-turn temporal development of conversation is a key factor influencing when and how interlocutors match each other’s linguistic representations. Although there is continuity between child-adult and adult-adult dialogue with respect to alignment of semantic representations, our results show important differences regarding syntactic alignment in adjacent turns, with adults showing less cross-speaker syntactic matches than expected by chance.