Spoken and written narration in Hebrew

Abstract

The study is premised on speech and writing relying on differently coordinated temporal frames of communication, aiming to pinpoint the conceptual and linguistic differences between spoken and written Hebrew narration. This is a case study presenting in-depth psycholinguistic analyses of the oral and written versions of a personal-experience story produced by the same adult narrator in Hebrew, taking into account discursive functions, discourse stance, linguistic expression, and information flow, processing, and cohesion. Findings of parallel spoken and written content units presenting the same narrative information point to the interface of the narrative genre with the spoken and written modalities, together with the mature cognitive, linguistic, and social skills and experience of adulthood. Both spoken and written personal-experience adult narrative versions have a non-personal, non-specific, detached stance, though the written units are more abstract and syntactically complex. Adult narrating skill encompasses both modalities, recruiting different devices for the expression of cohesion.