1 Überschrift 1

A substantial body of empirical work suggests people have a reliable tendency to match, amongst other things, their conversational partner’s body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use (Giles, Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, a more specific ‘structural priming’ version of this claim has gained prominence (e.g. Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when people’s processing of a particular linguistic structure is facilitated by prior exposure to the same structure. Much of the psycholinguistic evidence for these effects comes from experimental studies of single individuals processing a sequence of sentences. However, Pickering and Garrod (2004, 2006) propose that cross-person structural priming is a basic mechanism of conversational co-ordination. They claim that it is part of an automatic, resource-free priming mechanism that helps to underpin all successful human interaction. We present evidence from a corpus analysis of ordinary conversation which suggests that this claim is incorrect.