If you repeat your interlocutor’s syntactic structure, you are likely to repeat her pronunciation, too

Past studies showed that in dialogue, interlocutors copy each others’ behavior in various ways. Copying on one grammatical level leads to increased chances of copying on other levels as well, a so-called ‘alignment boost’. The identification of specific alignment boosts offers important insights into the architecture of language comprehension and production because it highlights relations between different types of linguistic representations. We examine the possibility of a direct influence from grammar on sound with no involvement of the conceptual system. In priming experiments with non-words, we show the existence of a direct syntactic alignment boost to segmental phonology. The outcomes are of relevance to models of language processing.