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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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This study examines co-referential repetitions in task-oriented dialogue for characteristics conducive to the lowered clarity of words naming Given entities. Pairs of word tokens repeatedly mentioning the same entity within a single task-oriented dialogue (n=294) and pairs introducing an entity in separate dialogues (n=48) were compared. In both samples intelligibility and length fell significantly with repeated mention. Deaccented second mentions, thought to be largely responsible for this effect, were rare (15% within, 6% between dialogues) and did not account for effects of repetition. Repetitions within sentences of the same structure are thought to encourage deaccenting, but were not common (6%, 35%), and structural similarity did not encourage deaccenting. Similarity in the conversational role of carrier utterances was associated with higher rates of similar structure among re-introductions, but not with increased frequency of deaccenting. Thus, factors which should promote marking of Givenness are either lacking or ineffective.
Bibliographic reference. Bard, E. G. / Aylett, Matthew P. (1999): "The dissociation of deaccenting, givenness, and syntactic role in spontaneous speech", In ICPhS-14, 1753-1756.