The Use of Time in Storytelling

A total of 18 experimental corpora of spontaneous speech in five languages (English, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish) were examined under the hypothesis that they are characterized by commonalities in the use of time. Each study was based on the same speech type, story telling elicited by pictorial materials. The temporal measures were speech and articulation rates, pause duration, phrase length, and percentage of pause time/total time. The hypothesis was confirmed except for studies carried out with identifiably variant methodologies. Further support for the hypothesis was found by contrasting the use of time characteristic of interviewees' speech.

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