Exploring the linguistic signature of interpersonal liking in second language interaction

Abstract

People worry about how they are seen by others, but their insights (called metaperceptions) are often too negative. For instance, many speakers believe that their interlocutors like them less than they actually do, and these overly negative metaperceptions inform speakers' actions such as asking for advice or pursuing friendships. Our goal was to understand if low, underconfident metaperceptions are associated with specific interactional behaviors for second language (L2) speakers, as a way of identifying a “linguistic signature” of insecure metaperceivers. We analyzed 10-min dyadic conversations by 37 L2-speaking university students discussing academic texts. Following the conversation, students provided their metaperceptions (how much they thought their partner liked them) and their actual assessments (how much they liked each other). We coded the conversations for eight measures of utterance fluency (repetitions, repairs, filled pauses, discourse markers) and speaker engagement (lexical content, mean length of turn, backchannels, overlapping speech). Whereas several measures predicted students' metaperceptions, none contributed to their actual assessments. Speakers who felt appreciated by their partner provided more lexical content across shorter conversational turns, whereas those who felt insecure assumed a dominant role speaking in long turns. These findings provide initial insights into how speakers’ metaperceptions manifest in their interactional behavior.