Anaphoric Distance in Oral and Written Language: Experimental Evidence

We investigate the variation in oral and written language in terms of anaphoric distance (i.e., the textual distance between anaphors and their antecedents), expanding corpus-based research with experimental evidence. Contrastive corpus studies demonstrate that oral genres include longer average anaphoric distance than written genres, if the distance is measured in terms of clauses (Fox, 1987; Aktas & Stede, 2020). We designed an experiment in order to examine the contrasts in oral and written mediums, using the same genre. We aim to gain more insight about the impact of the medium, in a situation where both mediums convey a similar level of spontaneity, informality and interactivity. We designed a story continuation study, where the participants are recruited via crowdsourcing. To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, where anaphoric distance is manipulated systematically in a language production experiment in order to examine medium distinctions. We observed that participants use more pronouns in oral medium than in written medium if the anaphoric distance is long. This result is in line with the implications of the earlier corpus-based research. In addition, our results indicate that anaphoric distance has a larger effect in referential choice for the written medium.