Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non-WEIRD Adult-Child Interactions.

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool-aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school-aged children from a non-WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners.