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Language and Speech
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Word Duration in Monologue and Dialogue Speech

Jan Mcallister

University of Auckland

Anne Potts

University of Auckland

Kathryn Mason

University of Auckland

Geoffrey Marchant

University of Auckland

The work reported here represents an attempt to extend the collaborative view of conversation (see, for example, Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) to the level of the characteristics of individual words - in particular, word duration. Speaker dyads engaged in the tangram task which has been widely used for researching discourse-level behaviour. Four monologue and four dialogue trials were recorded from each speaker. Content words which appeared in at least seven trials were identified, and the successive tokens of these words were digitised and measured. Overall, words spoken in monologues were reliably longer than words spoken in dialogues, suggesting that speakers were conservative in their estimate of how intelligible a listener would find the words when no visual or linguistic feedback was available. In addition, monologue and dialogue tokens exhibited different shortening effects in response to repetition; in dialogue, speakers attenuated word durations on the second mention, but in monologue no shortening occurred between successive repetitions, although a gradual decrease in duration was observed across the four trials. These results parallel findings relating to referring expressions, where the decline in the number of words used to refer to an entity is much sharper in dialogue than in monologue. The results are discussed within the framework of the collaborative model.

Key Words: dialogue • discourse • word duration

Language and Speech, Vol. 37, No. 4, 393-405 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/002383099403700404
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