Reductions of Spoken Words in Certain Discourse Contexts

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 expressions. In one investigation of spontaneous film narrations and in two follow-up 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 more 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.