ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, there has been much discussion among social psychologists about automaticity in relation to the control of social behaviour. In this chapter, we discuss automaticity in the context of language production, a key aspect of social behaviour. We consider automaticity and control in the context of both monologue and dialogue. The discussion is motivated by a recent claim by Pickering and Garrod (2004) that the fundamental mechanism underlying dialogue is an automatic process known as interactive alignment. We review this claim, and then analyse in more detail automaticity and language production.
