Word Duration in Monologue and Dialogue Speech

Abstract

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.

Keywords

dialogue discourse word duration

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

ANDERSON, A.H. , BADER, M. , BARD, E.G. , BOYLE, E. , DOHERTY, G. , GARROD, S. , ISARD, S. , KOWTKO, J. , MCALLISTER, J. , MILLER, J. , SOTILLO, C. , THOMPSON, H. , and WEINERT, R. , (1991). The HCRC Map Task Corpus. Language and Speech, 34, 351–366.

BARD, E. , SHILLCOCK, R. , and ALTMANN, G.T.M. , (1988). The recognition of words after their acoustic offsets: Effects of subsequent context. Perception & Psychophysics, 44, 395–408.

BEATTIE, G. , (1980). Encoding units in spontaneous speech: Some implications for the dynamics of conversation. In H.W. Dechert and M. Raupach , (Eds.), Temporal Variables in Speech: Studies in Honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 131–145). The Hague: Mouton.

CLARK, H. , and MARSHALL, C. , (1981). Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In A. Joshi , B. Webber , and I. Sag (Eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding (pp. 10–36). Cambridge, U.K.; Cambridge University Press.

CLARK, H. , and WILKES-GIBBS, D. , (1986). Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22, 1–39.

DUNNE, M. , and NG, S.H. , (1994). Simultaneous speech in small group conversation: All-together-now or one-at-a-time? Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 13, 45–71.

FOWLER, C. , (1988). Differential shortening of repeated content words produced in various communicative contexts. Language and Speech, 31, 307–320.

FOWLER, C. , and HOUSUM, J. , (1987). Talkers' signalling of ‘new’ and ‘old’ words in speech and listeners' perception and use of the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 489–504.

FUSSELL, S.R. , and KRAUSS, R.M. , (1989). The effects of intended audience on message production and comprehension: Reference in a common ground framework. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 203–219.

10.

GARROD, S. , and ANDERSON, A. , (1987). Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic coordination. Cognition, 27, 181–218.

11.

GOLDMAN-EISLER, F. , (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in Spontaneous Speech. London: Academic Press.

12.

HOWELL, D. , (1987). Statistical Methods for Psychology. Boston: Duxbury Press.

13.

HUNNICUTT, S. , (1985). Intelligibility versus redundancy - conditions of dependency. Language and Speech, 28, 47–56.

14.

HUPET, M. , SERON, X. , and CHANTRAINE, Y. , (1991). The effects of codability and discriminability of the referents on the collaborative referring procedure. British Journal of Psychology, 82, 449–462.

15.

ISAACS, E.A. , and CLARK, H.H. , (1987). References in conversation between experts and novices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 116, 26–37.

16.

KLATT, D. , (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in connected discourse. Journal of Phonetics, 3, 129–140.

17.

KLATT, D. , (1979). Synthesis by rule of segmental durations in English sentences. In B. Lindblom and S. Öhman (Eds.), Frontiers of Speech Communication Research (pp. 287–299). New York: Academic Press.

18.

KRAUSS, R.M. , and WEINHEIMER, S. , (1966). Concurrent feedback, confirmation, and the encoding of referents in verbal communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 343–346.

19.

LEVELT, W.J.M. , (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

20.

LIEBERMAN, P. , (1963). Some effects of syntactic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech. Language and Speech, 6, 172–175.

21.

McALLISTER, J. , (1991). The processing of lexically stressed syllables in read and spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 34, 1–26.

22.

McALLISTER, J,. (submitted). Referring in monologue and dialogue speech.

23.

McALLISTER, J., SOTILLO, C., and BARD, E,. (1991). The effect of addressee familiarity on word duration. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 426–429). Aix, Provence.

24.

MEHTA, G. , and CUTLER, A. , (1988). Detection of target phonemes in spontaneous and read speech. Language and Speech, 31, 135–156.

25.

SHIELDS, L. , and BALOTA, D. , (1991). Repetition and associative context effects in speech production. Language and Speech, 34, 47–55.

26.

UMEDA, N. , (1975). Vowel durations in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 58, 434–445.

27.

WILKES-GIBBS, D. , and CLARK, H. , (1992). Coordinating beliefs in conversation. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 183–194.