Alignment of Reference Frames in Dialogue

Previous research has shown that interlocutors in a dialogue align their utterances at several levels of representation. This paper reports two experiments that use a confederate-priming paradigm to examine whether interlocutors also align their spatial representations during dialogue. Experiment 1 showed a significant reference frame priming effect: Speakers tended to use the same reference frame to locate an object in a scene as the frame that they had just heard their interlocutor use. Experiment 2 demonstrated the same pattern even when the speaker's description and their partner's previous description involved different prepositions. Hence the effect cannot be explained in terms of lexical priming of a particular preposition. Our results are strong evidence that interlocutors in a dialogue align non-linguistic as well as linguistic representations.