Haskins Publications

Number	1047
Year	1997
Drawer	19
Entry Date	06/29/1998
Authors	Fowler, Carol A., Levy, Elena T., and Brown, Julie M.
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Publication	Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 1997, 24-40.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1047.pdf
Abstract	In discourse, speakers tend to choose lexically short words (e.g. pronouns) when the words’ referents are highly accessible to listeners. However, in narrations of a film, a change in episode between references to a character, even one who should otherwise be accessible to a listener, tends to block use of short experiments, we found that conditions fostering shortening and lengthening at the lexical level also fostered durational reduction and blocking of reduction of repeated names and of content words generally. The experiments confirm that episode boundaries tend to block durational shortening, but only when boundaries are marked by “metanarrative statements” (references, e.g., to a scene as such) not by narrative-level discontinuities.
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