Encoding and maintaining reference in oral discourse.

Florence Canoz (1) , Monique Vion (1)

1 CREPCO - Centre de Recherche en Psychologie Cognitive

This study deals with information management and reference encoding modes in oral discourse production. Three potentially influential factors were the distance between the first occurrence of an item and its later occurrences, a topic change that takes the focus off that item, and the span of the conceptual information available for verbalization. French-speaking adult subjects were asked to tell stories from comic strips to a listener who was unfamiliar with them. The frames in each strip were presented simultaneously or in succession. Four versions were generated for each comic strip: a given version was either short (three frames) or long (eight frames), and either did or did not have a topic change. The results showed that the target character was usually marked as a given, regardless of the version. This was more often true, however, when the topic did not change. When the character was treated as a given, referent accessibility marking was dependent on (1) topic change alone when the frames were presented simultaneously, and (2) topic change and comic strip length when the frames were presented in succession. The discussion analyzes the results in terms of the allocation of cognitive resources to maintaining coreference and to assisting addressees in their processing.

Mots clés: production; oral discourse; incremental processing; coreference; collaborative process

Domaines: Psychologie et comportements

Florence Canoz, Monique Vion. Encoding and maintaining reference in oral discourse.. International Journal of Psychology, 1994, 29 (5), pp.537-564. ⟨hal-00134165⟩