When people are talking, they can start to unconsciously mirror each other, for instance, in the words they use, their sentence structures and even hand gestures. This tendency to mirror others can lead to smoother conversations, while also fostering empathy and collaboration.
Past studies found that alignment can vary from person to person and that some individuals are more prone to mirroring others while they are interacting with them. However, earlier research did not conclusively establish whether alignment is a stable trait or if it varies based on situation-related factors.
Researchers at Aarhus University recently set out to address this unanswered question by analyzing large collections of recorded conversations used in linguistics research. The findings of their study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that alignment is not a fixed trait, as the extent to which people mirror others varies greatly across different situations.
“We are interested in conversational alignment, which is the tendency to reuse parts of someone’s utterance, such as specific words or structures, when replying to them,” Yngwie Asbjørn Nielsen, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “It is believed that aligning makes conversation easier, more efficient and more collaborative. Accordingly, aligning should be an important conversational skill, which has inspired researchers to look at alignment in, for instance, autism and children’s language development.”
Assessing the stability of conversational alignment
The recent work by Nielsen and his colleagues was inspired by a discrepancy in earlier research. While some studies, such as a recent paper by Christina Dideriksen, found that speakers adjust their alignment based on the situation they are in, others framed alignment as a stable individual trait. The latter view was particularly observed in studies focusing on autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by differences in social interactions and repetitive behaviors.
“We wondered: How much of alignment is specific to an individual and how much is due to the situation?” said Nielsen.
To answer this question, the researchers analyzed four large datasets that included 1,375 conversations between adults or between parents and their children. They specifically looked at the words used by speakers, the sentence structures they adopted and the meaning behind what they were communicating.
“If you want to know if something is a characteristic of an individual, you need to measure that individual several times, preferably in different situations,” explained Nielsen. “So, we looked for all the data we could find where people had several conversations, either in different contexts, with different interlocutors, or at different ages. We then quantified each speaker’s tendency to align on words, structures, and meanings, and finally tested whether there was a correlation in alignment across conversations.”
Interestingly, the team’s analyses revealed that while people’s alignment was moderately consistent during individual conversations, it varied greatly based on who they were interacting with, when a conversation took place and other contextual factors. This suggests that alignment is a flexible, situation-dependent skill that does not remain the same in all contexts.
Informing future research and alignment-related theory
The results of this recent study could have important implications for the understanding of ASD, which was previously linked to poor alignment skills. In fact, they suggest that alignment is not a fixed trait and that speakers, including autistic people, might be more prone to mirror some people than others or might adapt their alignment based on other contextual factors.
“We found that alignment is highly unstable and situation-dependent when you measure it in actual conversation,” said Nielsen. “This could imply that we need to think differently about how to characterize individuals in terms of their alignment tendencies. We argue that what matters is not how much but how well a person aligns. A ‘good aligner’ might adjust their level of alignment up or down to fit the situation, analogous to how a good writer mixes long and short sentences to fit their message to the genre and audience.”
To better explain their results and integrate them with existing alignment theory, Nielsen and his colleagues plan to soon develop a framework that delineates the situations in which aligning is beneficial and those in which it is not. In the future, their work could inform more studies exploring the factors that influence the extent to which people mirror others during conversations.
“We now want to develop a new measure that addresses some of the shortcomings that we pointed out. Ideally, alignment should be understood in relation to other conversational skills and to the demands of the task-at-hand,” added Nielsen.
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Publication details
Yngwie A. Nielsen et al, Conversational alignment as an individual difference, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.2205.
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