Narrating complexity

Phonetic correlates of narrative complexity in a corpus of Swiss Standard German storytelling

Abstract

We carried out an exploratory study of narrative complexity, focussing on coarse phonetic measures such as the duration and number of interpausal units. Our corpus features picturebased narratives produced by twenty German speakers from Switzerland. The task was designed to elicit simple and complex narratives, depending on the order of appearance of the events and the number of characters in the pictures. Our results show that complex stories have longer overall duration and higher number of interpausal units. A closer look reveals that most of the additional interpausal units in complex stories are short in duration and contain few syllables. Despite inter-speaker variation, this trend is also confirmed at the individual level. In our interpretation, even coarse quantitative phonetic metrics suggest that narrative complexity results not only into more material (i.e. duration), but also into less cohesion (i.e. fragmentation).