Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
October 2019, Volume 48, Issue 5, pp. 961-985
How Do Different Types of Alignment Affect Perceived Entity Status?
Tailer G. Ransom1 · Rick Dale2 · Roger J. Kreuz3 · Deborah Tollefsen1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract
Perceptions of entitativity are thought to be in influenced by salient features such as the physical proximity and physical similarity of group members (Campbell in Behav Sci 3:14–25, 1958). But social interactions among group members involve a number of low-level alignment (Pickering and Garrod in Behav Brain Sci 27:212–225, 2004) and synchronization (Marsh et al. in Top Cogn Sci 1:320–339, 2009) processes. Conversational partners, for instance, become aligned in syntax, semantics, emotion, and bodily posture. In this paper, we explore whether alignment correlates with observers' judgments of entitativity, and, moreover, which specific forms of alignment have the strongest effects on these judgments. Results revealed that only emotional alignment had on effect on judgments of entitativity. We discuss how future work may further assess the role of various dimensions in shaping the perception of group status in linguistic interaction.
Keywords Entitativity · Alignment · Interaction · Affect · Social cognition
✉ Tailer G. Ransom
tgransom@memphis.edu1 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
2 Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
3 Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA
Published online: 08 Apr 2019