RPF 11/12 Alignment in natural conversation

The principal objective of this pilot study was to test the feasibility of, and collect data for a large-scale international research project that will investigate interactional alignment in Chinese, Japanese, German and English. The term ‘alignment’ refers to the way speakers in conversation imitate aspects of each others’ language and physical behaviour. Alignment is currently a widely researched topic, as it shows how each person’s language use, and the social actions performed through it, are linked, socially and psychologically, to the language use and actions by other speakers. The majority of research on alignment so far has been on English, and we know little about whether, and how it is realised in other languages.
The project set out to collect data from 10 two-party conversations, 5 in German and 5 in English. Due to very successful recruitment strategies, 18 conversations could be recorded instead (12 English, 6 German). The data were sent to a professionla transcriber, and the final transcribed data was available for analysis in January 2013.