Benjamin Sacks

Much of our scientific understanding of language processing has been informed by controlled experiments divorced from the real-world demands of naturalistic communication. Conversation requires synchronization of rate, amplitude, lexical complexity, affective coloring, shared reference, and countless other verbal and nonverbal dimensions. Conversation is not merely a vector for information transfer but also serves as a mechanism for establishing or maintaining social relationships. This process of language calibration between interlocutors is known as linguistic alignment . We developed an open-source R package, ConversationAlign , capable of computing novel indices of linguistic alignment and main effects of language use between interlocutors by evaluating word choice across numerous semantic, affective, and lexical dimensions (e.g., valence, concreteness, frequency, word length). We describe the operations of ConversationAlign, including its primary functions of cleaning and transforming raw language data into simultaneous time series objects aggregated by interlocutor, turn, and conversation. We then outline mathematical operations involved in computing complementary indices of linguistic alignment that capture both local (synchrony in turn-by-turn scores) and global relations (overall proximity) between interlocutors. We present a use case of ConversationAlign applied to interview transcripts from American radio legend Terry Gross and her many guests spanning 15 years. We identify caveats for use and potential sources of bias (e.g., polysemy, missing data, robustness to brief language samples) and close with a discussion of potential applications to other populations. ConversationAlign (v 0.4.0) is freely available for download and use via CRAN or GitHub. For technical instructions and download, visit https://github.com/Reilly-ConceptsCognitionLab/ConversationAlign .

Much of our understanding of language processing has been informed by controlled laboratory experiments abstracted from the real world demands of naturalistic communication. Interactive language use “in the wild” involves synchronizing numerous verbal and non-verbal behaviors between interlocutors. Conversation partners synchronize verbal production through modulations of rate, amplitude, lexical-semantic complexity, affective tone, and many other dimensions. Much remains to be learned about how to measure linguistic alignment in naturalistic interactions. We developed an open-source R package (ConversationAlign) capable of computing novel indices of alignment and main effects of language use between interlocutors across 30 psycholinguistic dimensions (e.g., valence, concreteness, frequency, word length). We describe operations of the ConversationAlign workflow, including its primary functions of cleaning transcripts and transforming raw language data to simultaneous time series objects aggregated by interlocutor, turn, and conversation. We present a use case of ConversationAlign applied to interview transcripts between American radio legend, Terry Gross, and her many guests over the span of 15 years (Fresh Air Archive, 2001). We identify caveats for use and potential sources of bias (e.g., polysemy, missing data, robustness to brief language samples). We close with a discussion of potential applications to better understand lexical alignment. ConversationAlign is freely available for download and use via GitHub at https://github.com/Reilly-ConceptsCognitionLab/ConversationAlign