Lexical entrainment and success in student engineering groups

Abstract

Lexical entrainment is a measure of how the words that speakers use in a conversation become more similar over time. In this paper, we propose a measure of lexical entrainment for multi-party speaking situations. We apply this score to a corpus of student engineering groups using high-frequency words and project words, and investigate the relationship between lexical entrainment and group success on a class project. Our initial findings show that, using the entrainment score with project-related words, there is a significant difference between the lexical entrainment of high performing groups, which tended to increase with time, and the entrainment for low performing groups, which tended to decrease with time.