In this study of Soviet and American cross-cultural miscommunication (crosstalk), it is shown that stylistic variation, both lexically and syntactically, is perceived as serving different discourse functions, as well as indexing different aspects of the context. It is concluded that discourse participants take stylistic contextualization cues into account in their interpretation of cross-cultural miscommunication. A case is made for the quantitative modeling method of indexical processes (e.g. stylistic accommodation).