Use and acquisition of idiomatic expressions in referring by native and non-native speakers

When referring repeatedly to an object in conversation, two people typically come to use the same expression, a phenomenon called lexical entrainment (Brennan & Clark, 1996; Garrod & Anderson, 1987). But what happens when one partner is not as linguistically skilled as the other? In three experiments, we examined how native and non-native speakers adjust their referring expressions to each other in conversation. Twenty Asian language speakers learning English were tested before and after conversations with native English speakers in which they repeatedly matched pictures of common objects (Experiment 1). Lexical entrainment was just as common in native/nonnative pairs as in native/native pairs. People alternated director/matcher roles in the matching task; natives uttered more words than non-natives in the same roles. In Experiment 2, 31 natives rated the pre-and post-test expressions for naturalness; non-natives' post-test expressions were more natural than their pre-rest expressions. In Experiment 3, 20 natives rated expressions from the transcribed conversations. Native expressions took longer to rate and were judged less natural-sounding when they were addressed to non-natives than to other natives. These results are consistent with Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs's (1986) principle of Least Collaborative Effort.