ENCODING AND MAINTAINING REFERENCE IN ORAL DISCOURSE

This study deals with information management and reference encoding mo des in oral discourse production. Three potentially influential factor s were the distance between the first occurrence of an item and its la ter occurrences, a topic change that takes the focus off that item, an d the span of the conceptual information available for verbalization. French-speaking adult subjects were asked to tell stories from comic s trips to a listener who was unfamiliar with them. The frames in each s trip were presented simultaneously or in succession. Four versions wer e generated for each comic strip: a given version was either short (th ree frames) or long (eight frames), and either did or did not have a t opic 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 treat ed as a given, referent accessibility marking was dependent on (1) top ic 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 alloc ation of cognitive resources to maintaining coreference and to assisti ng addressees in their processing.