Cognitive and Affective Consequences of Language Alignment in Dyadic Coping

Dyadic coping is a couple level coping strategy, where partners respond to relationship external stressors as a unit. Dyadic coping behaviors have the ability to strengthen the relationship and improve both partners’ mental health outcomes in the face of adversity. Verbal communication is one of the primary channels of dyadic coping processes. As such, psycholinguistic investigations of predictors of successful dyadic coping comprise a growing body of research within the field of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Aspects of language such as pronoun use and emotion word use are common areas of study. In this study, I examined the effects of language alignment on dyadic coping outcomes among a sample of heterosexual couples. Specifically, I postulated that lexical and semantic alignment would lead to positive outcomes in the cognitive domain of dyadic coping, while alignment in function word use – also referred to as language style matching – would lead to positive outcomes in the affective domain of dyadic coping. I also explored the effect of the temporal dynamics of language alignment on the relevant outcomes. Findings suggest that while function word alignment is weakly predictive of the hypothesized outcomes, no detectable relationships exist between lexical and semantic alignment and cognitive outcomes relating to dyadic coping among my sample. This study also shows a potential weak recency effect of language style matching on one affective outcome of dyadic coping. The absence of statistically significant effects in this study should not be taken to mean that no such effect exists, but that a more sensitive approach with a larger sample may be necessary to uncover the subtle effects of language alignment on dyadic coping outcomes.