NEWS

New paper in Discourse Processes: The Primacy of Multimodal Alignment in Converging on Shared Symbols for Novel Referents by Marlou Rasenberg, Aslı Özyürek, Sara Bögels, & Mark Dingemanse

In this paper, authors focused on whether and how people use interactional resources such as multiple communicative modalities as well as alignment (i.e., cross-participant repetition of communicative behavior) multiple communicative modalities as well as on alignment (i.e., cross-participant repetition of communicative behavior) to achieve joint reference.

To explore this, authors systematically tracked the emergence of lexical and gestural alignment to establish shared symbols for novel objects in a referential communication task. Quantitative results of the study showed that participants used combination of lexical and gestural alignment frequently. Furthermore, such multimodal alignment was found to emerge earlier than unimodal alignment. Qualitative findings revealed the flexibility of lexical and gestural alignment in line with modality affordances and communicative needs.

Curious to learn more? You can find the paper (open access) here.