Cutting to the chase: The influence of first and second language use on discourse compression

Abstract

The present study looked into speakers’ capacity to shorten narratives through retelling, and specifically at differences in such discourse compression between bilinguals’ first (L1) and second (L2) language. A group of unbalanced Dutch-English bilinguals recounted the events from two cartoons in both languages four times. For each narration, word count (both including and excluding hesitation markers), duration, and fluency were recorded as dependent measures, all of which showed significant compression, i.e. economy in the oral production of the narrative, in both languages. Compression thus occurred in L1 as well as L2, indicating it relies on similar psycholinguistic mechanisms in both languages. Remarkably, whereas all L2 measures were less compressed in the initial narration than their L1 counterpart, compression with the first retelling was significantly higher in the L2 condition. Hence, whereas lexical access is expected to be more difficult in L2 initially, ultimately leading to increased disfluency, speaking behaviour did not seem to differ much from that in L1 once vocabulary, grammar, and syntax structures were primed.