While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time.

Interactive language use inherently involves a process of coordination, which often leads to matching behaviour between interlocutors in different semiotic channels. We study this process of interactive alignment from a multimodal perspective: using data from head-mounted eye-trackers in a corpus of face-to-face conversations, we measure which effect gaze fixations by speakers (on their own gestures, condition 1) and fixations by interlocutors (on the gestures by those speakers, condition 2) have on subsequent gesture production by those interlocutors. The results show there is a significant effect of interlocutor gaze (condition 2), but not of speaker gaze (condition 1) on the amount of gestural alignment, with an interaction between the conditions.

This study investigated the occurrence of interactive alignment between bilingual interlocutors communicating in a shared second language (L2). Thirty university-level students from various language backgrounds completed two information-exchange tasks in L2 English. Excerpts from the beginning and end of the interactions were presented to ten native-speaking listeners who rated each interlocutor individually and both interlocutors as a team for speech and personality variables, including degree of alignment. Results revealed interactive alignment which encompassed different aspects of interlocutors’ speech and personality characteristics in each task. Theoretical and practical implications for alignment as a sociocognitive phenomenon in lingua franca contexts are discussed.