A study of participants’ judgments of topic change during conversation: Global versus local definitions

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Abstract
Although considerable attention has been given to the definition of topic from both a global and local level, most of this work has been done entirely from the perspective of researchers. We examined perceptions of global and local topic change from the point of view of conversation participants. The results indicate that participants readily agree on points of topic change at the global level, but demonstrate relatively little agreement at the local level. These results were discussed in terms of the current debate over global versus local topic definition as well as other implications for future research.