Aspects of Linguistic Alignment Reflect Social, Not Communicative, Pressures

Conversational partners often align through word choice and syntax. To assess whether this reflects communicative or sociocultural pressures, we manipulated the prestige and understandability of an interlocutor’s accent. Lexical, but not syntactic, alignment was greater with a high- compared to low-prestige foreign-accented interlocutor, suggesting sociocultural pressures influence word choice.