A study investigated how repetition was used in the telling of personal narratives to create emotional involvement on the part of listeners, to evaluate stories, to prevent listeners from asking questions and from losing the story's focus, and to justify narrating that particular story in a cross-cultural setting. It was assumed that narrators from different cultures (American English, British English, Turkish) would use repetition for different narrative purposes. Subjects were 15 each Turkish, British, and American high school graduates, college students and graduates, and college faculty. Each narrated a personal experience about a danger of death situation or an event creating nervousness, using his native language, which was analyzed for repetition types (lexical, syntactic, discursal), subcategories, functions (emphatic, thematic, persuasive, artistic), and frequency. It is concluded that narrators from different cultures use different discourse strategies to evaluate their narratives and involve listeners. However, since cultural expectations direct communication, the potential for miscommunication exists in cross-cultural exchanges. Contains 20 references. (MSE)