“Talk to me with left, right, and angles”: Lexical entrainment in spoken Hebrew dialogue

Andreas Weise, Vered Silber-Varod, Anat Lerner, Julia Hirschberg, Rivka Levitan


Abstract
It has been well-documented for several languages that human interlocutors tend to adapt their linguistic productions to become more similar to each other. This behavior, known as entrainment, affects lexical choice as well, both with regard to specific words, such as referring expressions, and overall style. We offer what we believe to be the first investigation of such lexical entrainment in Hebrew. Using two existing measures, we analyze Hebrew speakers interacting in a Map Task, a popular experimental setup, and find rich evidence of lexical entrainment. Analyzing speaker pairs by the combination of their genders as well as speakers by their individual gender, we find no clear pattern of differences. We do, however, find that speakers in a position of less power entrain more than those with greater power, which matches theoretical accounts. Overall, our results mostly accord with those for American English, with a lack of entrainment on hedge words being the main difference.
Anthology ID:
2021.eacl-main.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Paola Merlo, Jorg Tiedemann, Reut Tsarfaty
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
292–299
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Weise, Vered Silber-Varod, Anat Lerner, Julia Hirschberg, and Rivka Levitan. 2021. “Talk to me with left, right, and angles”: Lexical entrainment in spoken Hebrew dialogue. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pages 292–299, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Talk to me with left, right, and angles”: Lexical entrainment in spoken Hebrew dialogue (Weise et al., EACL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.eacl-main.23.pdf