Do Speaker’s Emotions influence their Language Production? Studying the Influence of Disgust and Amusement on Alignment in Interactive Reference

The influence of emotion on (the early stages of) speech production processes, notably content selection has received little scholarly attention. Goudbeek & Krahmer (2012) found evidence for alignment at the conceptual level: speakers may start using a dispreferred attribute over a preferred attribute in their referring expressions when they are primed by a pre-recorded female voice in a preceding interaction. The current study aimed to assess the role of emotion (using amusement and disgust) in alignment, while simultaneously replicating this finding in a more naturalistic setting involving two human participants in naturalistic dialogue. Our results replicate the findings by Goudbeek & Krahmer (2012), generalizing their findings to a much more naturalistic setting. In addition, we found that amused, but not disgusted speakers tend to use the preferred attribute more to describe objects to their conversational partner.