Abstract
An important assumption in sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology is that human beings adjust their language use to their interlocutors. Put simply, the more often people talk (or write) to each other, the more similar their speech becomes. Such accommodation has often been observed in small-scale observational studies and experiments, but large-scale longitudinal studies that systematically test whether the accommodation occurs are scarce. We use data from a very large Swedish online discussion forum to show that linguistic production of the users who write in the same subforum does usually become more similar over time. Moreover, the results suggest that this trend tends to be stronger for those pairs of users who actively interact than for those pairs who do not interact. Our data thus support the accommodation hypothesis.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.nodalida-1.42
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
- Editors:
- Tanel Alumäe, Mark Fishel
- Venue:
- NoDaLiDa
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- University of Tartu Library
- Note:
- Pages:
- 415–424
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.nodalida-1.42
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Aleksandrs Berdicevskis and Viktor Erbro. 2023. You say tomato, I say the same: A large-scale study of linguistic accommodation in online communities. In Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 415–424, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. University of Tartu Library.
- Cite (Informal):
- You say tomato, I say the same: A large-scale study of linguistic accommodation in online communities (Berdicevskis & Erbro, NoDaLiDa 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.nodalida-1.42.pdf