LINGUIST List 14.3541

Sun Dec 21 2003

Sum: Repetition and Fluency

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Ewa Dabrowska, Repetition and fluency

In October, I posted a query (Linguist 14.2852) about research on the
relationship between repetition and fluency: specifically, showing
that when people repeat the same story, they tend to become more
fluent on each retelling. Thanks to Anat Stavans, Suzy Styles, Taylor
Roberts, and James Fidelholtz who responded to the message.

Anat Stavans mentioned a book by Verhoeven and Stromqvist (2001) on
Language in multilingual contexts, which contains several papers on
bilingual narratives (Berman, Stavans, Lanza).

Suzy Styles recommends a paper on narratives in bilingual children:
Haritos & Nelson (2001), 'Bilingual Memory: The interaction of
Language and Thought', Bilingual Research Journal, 25:4, pp 605-626.

Taylor Roberts suggested Mark Twain's autobiography as a
useful source of anecdotal corroboration.

All of this was interesting, but not quite what I wanted. In the
meantime, however, I have been able to trace one of the original
studies, viz.

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

The following is a useful summary on research on hesitations:

O'Connell, D. C. & Kowal, S.: Pausology. In W. A. Sedelow &
S. Y. Sedelow. Computers in Language Research 2. Mouton Publishers,
Berlin, New York, Amsterdam (1983) 221-301.

For those with a serious interest in this area, Peter Roach has put up
a bibliobraphy of work on timing and rhythm in speech, downloadable
from http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/timing.pdf