Task-solving in dialogue depends on the linguistic alignment of the interlocutors, which Pickering & Garrod (2004) have suggested to be based on mechanistic repetition effects. In this paper, we seek confirmation of this hypothesis by looking at repetition in corpora, and whether repetition is correlated with task success. We show that the relevant repetition tendency is based on slow adaptation rather than short-term priming and demonstrate that lexical and syntactic repetition is a reliable predictor of task success given the first five minutes of a taskoriented dialogue. .
