Eliciting Longer Utterances in L2 Settings via Linguistic Alignment

While redundancies are present in language, the situations and mechanisms that drive redundancy usage remain opaque. One possible cause of redundancy usage may be linguistic alignment, which refers to the tendency for interlocutors in a dialogue to imitate each other’s linguistic behaviors (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Thus, encountering an interlocutor using redundancies in their writing may cause a person to produce redundancies as well in subsequent productions (e.g., Loy & Smith, 2021; Goudbeek & Kramer, 2012). However, few studies have examined the linguistic alignment of redundancies, with none researching redundancy alignment in a second language (L2) setting.
The potential for redundancy alignment in L2 settings is consequential for language learning, as the amount of interaction a language learner has with their L2 is an important driver of L2 learning (see Piske & Young-Scholten, 2009). Thus, the presence of redundancy alignment in L2 settings entails that encountering redundancies in written text may lead to increased redundancy usage (i.e., more text output and more L2 interaction), leading to better L2 learning outcomes. This current study tests whether redundancy alignment is present with L2 learners using a shape matching and naming task.