Grounding styles of aged dyads: an exploratory study 
Atsue Takeoka, Atsushi Shimojima 
School of Knowledge Science 
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 
1-1, Asahidai, Tatsunokuchi, Ishikawa, 923-1292, Japan 
{takeoka, ashimoji}@jaist.ac.jp 
 
Abstract 
This paper reports an exploratory study of 
the grounding styles of older dyads, namely, 
the characteristic ways in which they 
mutually agree to have shared a piece of 
information in dialogue. On the basis of 
Traum’s classification of grounding acts, 
we conducted an exploratory comparison of 
dialogue data on older and younger dyads, 
and found that a fairly clear contrast holds 
mainly in the types of acknowledgement 
utterances used by the two groups. We will 
discuss the implications of this contrast, 
concerning how some of the negative 
stereotypes about conversations with older 
people may arise from this difference in 
grounding styles. 
1 Introduction 
Clark (1996) developed the notion of grounding to 
capture intricate processes with which conversants 
establish a set of information as a shared common 
ground for on-going (and possibly subsequent) 
dialogue. In a grounding process, a conversant 
presents a piece of information verbally or 
non-verbally, and the partner issues a particular 
public signal of the receipt, understanding, or 
acceptance of that information. Once a piece of 
information is thus incorporated into a common 
ground, it is available as something than can be 
presupposed in subsequent communication, in 
which still another change to the common ground 
is worked out. 
On the basis of Clark’s work, Traum (1994) 
shows a way of substantiating the process of 
grounding in a finite-state transition model, which 
specifies what contributions to a grounding 
process can be made by individual utterances in 
dialogue and how individual contributions 
combine themselves to make a sequence that 
completes the grounding. In Traum’s terms, such 
contributions are grounding acts, and the units of 
utterance that can perform grounding acts are 
utterance units, and the sequences of utterance 
units that complete are discourse units. 
Now, both Clark’s and Traum’s models of 
grounding are generic, in the sense that they both 
admit a significant range of forms or styles in 
which actual processes of grounding may take 
place. That is, their models tell us what forms of 
grounding sequences are possible or well-formed, 
but do not tell what particular forms are most 
frequent in actual dialogues or, more specifically, 
what forms are most frequent in what sorts of 
dialogue situations. Thus, on the basis of Clark’s 
and Traum’s work, natural questions arise as to 
grounding styles, namely, the possibility of 
characteristic forms of grounding sequences 
adopted by particular types of conversants in 
particular types of occasions. 
This paper investigates this question in its 
special application to casual, non-task-oriented 
dialogues conducted by aged people. Do people 
develop a characteristic style of grounding as they 
age? If so, what exactly distinguish their grounding 
styles in casual, non-task-oriented settings?  
To address these questions, we collected a 
spoken dialogue data comprising both older dyads 
and younger dyads, and analyzed the grounding 
processes in our data on the basis of Traum’s 
finite-state model. 
Why are we particularly interested in possible 
grounding styles of aged people? It is rather 
common that younger people find difficult or get 
frustrated in conversing with aged people. Thus, a 
common stereotype says that conversations with 
aged people are slow-paced, repetitive, and 
     Philadelphia, July 2002, pp. 188-195.  Association for Computational Linguistics.
                  Proceedings of the Third SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue,
therefore boring. It is perhaps because of these 
oft-felt problems that younger people often adopt 
“patronizing speech styles” or “secondary baby 
talk” toward aged people, characterized by 
restricted topics, childlike expressions, directive 
speech, and exaggerated nonverbal signals (Ryan 
& Hummert, 1995) or by slower speech, varied 
paraphrases, decreased grammatical complexity, 
lower propositional density, and other 
modifications (Kemper & Vandeputte, 1995). 
Now, it seems customary that these 
communicative problems between older people 
and younger people are attributed to the side of 
aged people only, to their difficulties in auditory 
reception, alleged slowness of understanding, and 
alleged stubbornness in accepting new ideas. 
However, they may not be problems with one side 
only, nor problems with cognitive capacities or 
personal characters of aged people, but may largely 
come from different grounding styles adopted by 
the two groups of people. That is, the ways they 
agree to have a piece of information shared may 
have different recurrent patterns, and this 
difference may be a real cause of the difficulty and 
the negative stereotype. If so, digging out this 
difference and identifying the characteristic 
grounding styles of aged people are a necessity for 
scientific treatments of communicative problems 
commonly attributed to aged people, as well as 
informed design of dialogue systems that interact 
with aged people. 
Nevertheless, most studies related to 
communications of aged people have focused on 
the influence of aging on basic linguistic 
competence such as word retrievals (Tatsumi 1997, 
Ministry of Health and Welfare 1999), and studies 
of their behaviors in actual dialogues have been 
quite scarce. The studies by Ryan & Hummert 
(1995) and Kemper & Vandeputte (1995) did touch 
on the conversational styles adopted by aged 
people, but their focus was more on the 
conversational styles adopted by younger people 
toward aged people. The study by Bortfeld et al. 
(2001) was exceptional in that it measured the 
number of fillers, restarts, and repairs to evaluate 
disfluency of aged people’s speech in 
conversational settings. Yet, the focus of this study 
was on the characteristics of speech by individual 
conversants, rather than the ways in which they 
interact. Thus, conversational styles of aged people, 
let alone their grounding styles, have been seldom 
studied systematically. 
Under this situation, we have no specific 
hypothesis as to whether aged people have any 
characteristic grounding styles and if so, what they 
are. Our purpose in this study is therefore 
exploratory, dedicated to a search for plausible 
hypotheses about grounding styles of aged dyads, 
rather than a verification of their existence and 
specifics. Although our study is thus hypothetical 
in nature, we did identify two clearly 
distinguishable grounding styles in our data, 
correlated with the age ranges of conversants. In 
the following, we will report what they are, how 
they are found, and what implications their 
difference has as to some negative stereotypes 
about conversations with aged people. 
2 Method 
The details of the corpus, its collection, and the 
assignment of tags are given below. 
2.1 Dialogue Data 
Our data consist of 5 dialogues by older dyads (age 
range: 80-88, sd: 2.1) and 5 dialogues by younger 
dyads (age range: 23-39, sd: 5.2). Most of the older 
participants were therefore so-called “older-olds,” 
meaning that they were between 75 and 85 years of 
age. Familiarities of the older dyads were strong: 
they had known each other since they were 
children or after they moved into the current areas 
of residence, although they started talking each 
other frequently after they joined an common local 
association several years ago. The younger dyads 
were also familiar with each other: they had 
worked in the same department of an institute for at 
least 3 months and up to 5 years and had talked 
with each other almost every working day. 
Dialogues of older dyads were videotaped in a 
community center that the subjects regularly visit 
for activities of their association. Videotaping of 
younger adults took place in a lounge space of their 
work place. The dialogues were casual 
conversations in Japanese, involving no specific 
objectives or tasks. The dialogue topics between 
older dyads included community events, common 
friends, their girlhood, and garden work, while the 
topics between younger adults included their job, 
their children, their cars, and common friends. The 
length of a dialogue in either group was from 30 to 
50 minutes. Older adults participated in our data 
collection on the voluntary basis, while we paid a 
small amount of money for participation of 
younger adults. 
2.2 Transcription and coding 
Transcription 
We transcribed a 5-minute portion after 3 minutes 
from the beginning of each dialogue. All words 
and word fragments audible to the ear were 
transcribed, including overlapping speech, 
nonlexical fillers (such as “uh”), and other 
vocalizations (such as laughter and whistle). After 
each dialogue was transcribed, we checked the 
videotape to add data of all noddings and salient 
gestures (facial expressions and hand movements) 
to the transcription. The transcriber solicited the 
help of some local residents to understand some of 
the dialectical expressions contained used in 
dialogues by older dyads. 
Coding 
On the basis of Traum’s finite-state transition 
model of grounding, we divided all speech in our 
dialogue data into utterance units (UUs), namely, 
“continuous speech by the same speaker, 
punctuated by prosodic boundaries (including 
pauses of significant length and boundary tones)” 
(Traum, 1994). One of the present authors then 
classified each utterance unit into one of seven 
categories of grounding acts, according to its 
contribution to a grounding process. Table 1 shows 
the seven categories of grounding acts and their 
definitions. 
 
Table 1. Seven categories of grounding acts 
 
Initiate 
(init) 
An initial utterance component of a 
Discourse unit. 
Continue 
(cont) 
A continuation of a previous act 
performed by the same speaker. 
Acknowl- 
edgement 
(ack) 
An acknowledgement claiming or 
demonstrating understanding of a 
previous utterance. It may be either a 
repetition or paraphrase of all or part 
of the utterance, an explicit signal of 
comprehension such as “ok” or “uh 
huh”, or an implicit signaling of 
understanding. 
Repair 
(repair) 
Changes the content of the current 
DU. 
ReqRepair 
(reqRepair) 
A request for a repair by the other 
party. 
ReqAck 
(reqAck) 
Attempt to get the other agent to 
acknowledge the previous utterance. 
Cancel 
(cancel) 
Closes off the current DU as 
ungrounded. 
 
Reliability 
To check the reliability of our coding scheme, we 
asked two independent subjects to code a portion 
of our data and compared their results with our 
own. As an instruction to these independent coders, 
we produced a coding manual that lists Traum’s 
definitions of the seven categories of grounding 
acts (see Table 1), sample utterances of each 
category, and some general notes on treatments of 
marginal cases such as fillers, simultaneous 
utterances, and utterances with both Init and Ack 
functions. The subjects did some exercise coding 
before actual coding, and they were encouraged to 
ask questions about the coding standard during the 
exercise period. Both transcribed text and audio 
recording were available to the subjects during the 
actual coding. The subjects coded two partial 
dialogues one from older dyads and the other from 
younger dyads. Each dialogue was about 2.5 
minute in length. 
The interrater reliability among the original 
coder and these two subjects was excellent; there 
was an 83% agreement, with a Cohen’s Kappa 
of .78, for dialogues by older dyads (UUs = 138, 
coders = 3, categories = 9) and a 78% agreement, 
with a Cohen’s Kappa .77, for dialogues by 
younger dyads (UUs = 128, coders = 3, categories 
= 9). 
3 Results 
Thus, our data comprise both dialogues by older 
dyads and ones by younger dyads, but these two 
groups of dialogues were not tightly controlled in 
their settings and therefore are not appropriate for 
exact comparison. For the limited purpose of 
exploratory data analysis, however, it is 
convenient to tentatively divide our data into these 
two groups and compare them from various points 
of view. This section reports four main results of 
such exploratory comparisons, in terms of (1) the 
length of disourse units, (2) the types of frequently 
used acknowledgments, and (3) the frequencies of 
collaborative completions and echoic responses. 
3.1 Utterance units and discourse units 
The two groups of dialogues had no significant 
differences in the total numbers of discourse units 
(older adults, 446; younger adults, 482) and the 
total numbers of utterance units (older adults, 
1406; younger adults, 1309). This roughly means 
that older dyads grounded information as 
frequently as younger dyads, and the numbers of 
utterances needed for each grounding are about the 
same in older dyads and in younger dyads. 
Also, the frequencies of occurrences of the 
seven categories of grounding acts were about the 
same in older dyads and younger dyads (Figure 1).  
 
33.3% 24.5%
29.9%
33.2%
32.9%30.6% 5.6%
7.1%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Init Cont Ack no acts
older dyads
younger dyads
 
 
Figure 1. Ratios of grounding acts in older dyads 
and younger dyads 
 
That is, older dyads used grounding acts in about 
the same variety and variance as younger dyads 
did. 
3.2 Types of Acknowledgements 
Initiation-acknowledgements 
Generally, an “acknowledgement act” appears at 
the end of a grounding unit, indicating that 
conversants have mutually understood what the 
presenter said. In contrast, an “initiate act” appears 
at the beginning of a grounding unit, initiating the 
presentation of a new information unit. Sometimes, 
a speaker performs both initiation and 
acknowledgement at the same time, by producing 
an initiation utterance whose content presupposes 
the understanding of the preceding presentation. 
An example is found in dialogue excerpt (1) 
from an older dyad, where one of B’s utterances, 
“a-hon-na-ikatta (that’s good),” acknowledges the 
previous utterance of speaker A while initiating 
B’s presentation of her own information. 
 
(1) 
act UU  Utterance 
init
17
 35.1 A: honera 
   (so) 
cont
17
(35.1) 35.2 : koneda[laugh] 
   (the other day) 
cont
17
(35.2) 35.3 : isha-so-ii-mashita 
   (the doctor said so) 
ack
17
 init
18
 36.1 B: a-hon-na-ikatta 
   (that’s good) 
ack
18
 37.1 A: n 
   (m) 
init
19
 38.1 B: sore-kiitara-anshin-yawano 
   (that may make you feel at 
ease) 
 
We found that acknowledgements of this type 
accounts for a 27% of all acknowledgement 
utterances made by younger adults, while they 
account for only a 10% of those by older adults 
(see the top section of each column in Figure 2). 
The difference was significant 
(t(5)=2.87, .01<p<.05, two-tailed). 
 
233
225
203
110
138
51
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
older dyads younger dyads
(10.3%)
(42.8%)
(46.9%)
(26.7%)
(22.4%)
(50.9%)
initiation-ack
general-
purpose ack
non-general-
purpose ack
 
 
Figure 2. Ratios of the three types of 
acknowledgements in older dyads and younger 
dyads 
 
General-purpose acknowledgements 
Beside these dual-functional acknowledgments, 
there were a significant number of “dedicated” 
acknowledgements, namely, utterances annotated 
as “acknowledgements” but not as anything else. 
Inside these dedicated acknowledgements, 
however, we can distinguish two types. One type  
consists of general-purpose acknowledgements, 
such as “uh-huh” and “m”, that could be used 
irrespective of the contents of the preceding 
presentations. The other type comprises 
special-purpose acknowledgements, such as 
repeating or paraphrasing responses, whose 
contents must vary depending on the contents of 
the preceding presentations. An example of 
general-purpose acknowledgement is speaker A’s 
short utterance “n (m)” in excerpt (2). In contrast, 
speaker B’s utterance “n-n-mite (m, you saw it)” in 
excerpt (3) is a case of special-purpose 
acknowledgment since it paraphrases the 
preceding utterance by speaker A and thus depends 
on its specific content.
1
 
 
(2) 
act UU  Utterance 
init
26
 50.1 B: nanka-sono 
   (well) 
cont
26
(50.1) 50.2  shinseki-no-hito-kaeru 
   (the relative left) 
cont
26
(50.2) 50.3  koro-ni-natte 
   (at time) 
ack
26
 51.1 A: n 
   (m) 
init
27
  B: obaasan-ga-kite 
   (her grand mother came and) 
cont
27
(52.1)   anta-aisatu-senkaine-tte 
   (said “`you must greet them”) 
 
 
(3) 
act UU  Utterance 
init
1
 2.1 B: hora-sangousha-noran-naran-wa
-tte 
   (then I had to get in the third car) 
ack
1
 3.1 A: [laugh] 
    
init
2
 4.1 B: isshokenme-ni-sangousha-n-tok
o-he 
   (I tried hard to get to the car) 
cont
2
(4.1) 4.2 : hata-sanbon-mitoite 
   (seeing the flag) 
ack
2
 5.1 A: n-n-mite 
   (m, you saw it) 
init
3
 6.1 B: hoite-ittara-mannin-ya-yappa 
   (When I got to the car, it had no 
seats) 
ack
3
 7.1 A: aa 
   (ah) 
 
1 Actual classifications of dedicated 
acknowledgements into general-purpose and 
special purpose acknowledgements are subtler 
than suggested here. For example, an utterance that 
sounds “n (m)” could be classified as 
special-purpose if it has a marked prosodic feature 
that signals the speaker’s emotion or feeling. 
Interestingly, older dyads produced more 
general-purpose acknowledgements (43%) than 
younger adults did (23%). The difference is highly 
significant (χ
2
(2)=67.2, p<.01), as we can also see 
by comparing the middle sections of the two 
column in Figure 2. 
Post-grounding acknowledgements 
Dialogues conducted by older dyads contained 
several instances of requests for acknowledgement 
issued after acknowledgements, while those by 
younger dyads contained no such instances (older 
dyads, 9; younger dyads, 0). For example, the 
second request for acknowledgement “ne (see?)” 
towards the end of excerpt (4) was issued after the 
acknowledgment “n (m)” by speaker A, requesting 
further acknowledgement of the presentation 
“watashi-no-shita-wo (and my younger sister)” 
that had been already grounded. This phenomenon 
is particularly interesting since a request for 
acknowledgement after acknowledgement is not in 
the scope of Traum’s finite-state transition model 
of grounding sequences. 
 
(4) 
act UU  Utterance 
init
92
 178.1 B: hoide-shita-ga 
   (and my younger brother) 
reqAck
92
 178.2 : ne 
   (see?) 
ack
92
 179.1 A: n 
   (m) 
init
93
 180.1 B: ano 
   (what was that?) 
cont
93
(180.1) 180.2 : nakanogou-he-yattee 
   (they left him in relative 
hand) 
ack
93
 181.1 A: n 
   (m) 
init
94
 182.1 B: watashi-no-shita-wo 
   (and my younger sister) 
ack
94
 183.1 A: n 
   (m) 
reqAck
94
 184.1 B: ne 
   (see?) 
ack
94
 185.1 A: n 
   (m) 
 
Furthermore, older dyads produced 
“acknowledgements after acknowledgements” 
slightly more frequently than younger did (older 
adults, 35; younger adults, 25). The second 
utterance “nn (m)” by speaker B is an instance of 
that type of acknowledgements. 
 
(5) 
act UU  Utterance 
cont
34
(64.3) 64.4 B: hachiju-kara-ue-ni-narya-
nani-wo-nn-na-aryan-na 
   (as we get over 80’s) 
cont
34
(64.4) 64.5 : otoroeru-bakkari-ya 
   (we are languishing) 
ack
34
 65.1 A: hou-ya 
   (right) 
ack
34
 66.1 B: nn 
   (m) 
 
3.3 Collaborative completion and echoic 
response 
Collaborative completions were slightly more 
frequent in older dyads than in younger dyads 
(older adults, 13; younger adults, 7). Likewise, 
echoic responses were   more frequent in older 
dyads than in younger dyads (older adults, 23; 
younger adults, 10). Speaker A’s second utterance 
in excerpt (6) is an example of collaborative 
completion done by an older dyad, and speaker B’s 
second utterance in excerpt (7) is an example of 
echoic response done by an older speaker. 
 
(6) 
act UU  Utterance 
init
37
 74.1 B: hitori-oru-ga-to 
   (whether being alone or) 
ack
37
 75.1 A: n 
   (m) 
init
38
 76.1 B: nina-tooru-ga-to 
   (being with someone) 
cont
38
(76.1) 76.2 : debu-kibun-ga 
   (feels) 
ack
38
 init
39
 77.1 A: chigau-ga 
   (a big difference) 
ack
39
 78.1 B: chigota-tte-ne 
   (yes, it’s different) 
 
 
(7) 
act UU  Utterance 
ack
1
 2.2 B: ooi-yo 
   (you’re right) 
init
2
 3.1 A: tanba-dekiru-ga-ya 
   (that’s how rice can grow) 
ack
2
 4.1 B: dekiru-ga-ya 
   (can grow) 
4 Discussions 
Thus, our exploratory comparison suggests several 
points of difference between dialogues by older 
dyads and dialogues by younger dyads. What 
would these individual differences reveal about 
common stereotypes about conversations with 
aged people? Do these individual differences 
combine themselves to define two different 
grounding styles attributable to older and younger 
dyads? 
4.1 Initiation-acknowledgement 
utterances were less frequent in older 
dyads. 
Initiation-acknowledgements are dual-functional 
utterances, performing two grounding acts by 
single utterance units. Dedicated 
acknowledgments are mono-functional, 
performing single grounding functions per single 
utterance units. Thus, if we define the grounding 
tempo of a given part of dialogue as the ratio of the 
number of utterance units to the number of 
different grounding acts performed by them, then 
an occurrence of initiation-acknowledgement 
certainly increases the grounding tempo of the 
local context. 
In contrast, a dedicated acknowledgement has 
no such accelerative effect on grounding tempo, 
and a frequent use of dedicated acknowledgements 
may even cause impressions of relative slowness 
of the grounding tempo in the local context. Now 
our exploratory comparison indicated that older 
dyads used dedicated acknowledgements more 
frequently than younger dyads, who used 
initiation-acknowledgements more frequently. It is 
then plausible that this contrast in the kinds of 
frequently used acknowledgements underlies the 
common impression that conversations with older 
people are slow-paced and, since the grounding 
tempo is related to how efficiently information is 
shared, this contrast might partially account for the 
common impression that older people understand 
things slowly. 
 
4.2  Older adutls often acknowledged 
after acknowledgements. 
In this regard, an occurrence of post-grounding 
acknowledgment must have a deceleration effect 
on the grounding tempo in the local context. For 
the grounding function it performs, namely, the 
acknowledgement of the presented information, is 
one that has been done by the preceding 
acknowledgement, and thus the ratio of the number 
of utterance units to the number of grounding 
functions performed by them is even worse than 
the case of dedicated acknowledgments. Now 
again, our exploratory comparison indicated that 
older dyads used post-grounding 
acknowledgements more frequently than younger 
dyads. This contrast therefore might be an added 
cause to the stereotypes mentioned above, 
slow-pacedness and slow-understanding. 
4.3 Older adults tended to use 
general-purpose acknowledgements 
more frequently. 
Precisely because the form of a general-purpose 
acknowledgement, such as “uh-huh” and “m,” 
does not depend on the content of the utterance 
being acknowledged, a general-purpose 
acknowledgement gives only weak evidence of 
reception or understanding of the content. In 
contrast, a special-purpose acknowledgement, 
such as repeating or paraphrasing responses, has 
stronger evidentiality, since its form is the result of 
an appropriate choice relative to the content of the 
acknowledged utterance. Now, our preliminary 
comparison indicated that older dyads used 
general-purpose acknowledgements more 
frequently than younger dyads, and this contrast 
may well be still another cause to the negative 
stereotype on older people’s capacities for 
understanding during conversation. 
4.4 Two Grounding Styles 
Overall, our exploratory comparison suggests a 
particular style of grounding as characteristic to 
older dyads. That is, older dyads use more 
dedicated acknowledgments than dual-functional 
acknowledgements involving initiations, and 
among dedicated acknowledgements, older dyads 
use more general-purpose acknowledgements than 
special-purpose acknowledgements; they also use 
post-grounding acknowledgements relatively often, 
either spontaneously or solicited by requests for 
acknowledgements. Let us call this grounding style 
style A, and call the grounding style characterized 
by the opposite tendencies style B. 
Now we have obtained this hypothetical 
contrast in grounding styles through an overall 
comparison of the entire group of older dyads and 
the entire group of younger dyads. So the question 
remains how much this contrast applies to 
individual dyads of older and younger people. 
Aren’t there any exceptional older dyads with 
grounding style B? Any younger dyads with 
grounding style A? 
To address these questions, we re-evaluated our 
data and ranked all ten dialogues in our data 
according to the ratios of dedicated 
acknowledgements, the ratios of  general-purpose 
acknowledgements, and the counts of 
post-grounding acknowledgements (solicited 
acknowledgements and spontaneous 
acknowledgements). Table 2 shows the result of 
ranking, where the hatched cells indicate dialogues 
by older dyads. Here we see that the contrast of 
style A and style B divides older dyads and 
younger dyads fairly clearly. In fact, the separation 
of older and younger dyads is statistically 
significant in the ratio of dedicated 
acknowledgements (W
0
>=w
5,5
(0.01)=39, 
two-tailed), the ratio of general-purpose 
acknowledgements (W
0
>=w
5,5
(0.025)=38, 
two-tailed) and the counts of solicited 
post-grounding acknowledgements (E(R)=27.5, 
V(R)=36, Z
0
=3.75, Z(a)=3.09, p<0.002, 
two-tailed). Thus, our hypothesis associating style 
A to older dyads and style B to younger dyads 
receives some initial supports from this analysis. 
On the other hand, Table 2 also shows certain 
exceptions to this association, namely, some older 
dyads with style B and some younger dyads with 
style A. This is only natural as we can easily 
imagine older people who talk like younger people 
as well as younger people who talk like older 
people. Styles are styles, and they are not natural 
traits exclusively possessed by particular species 
of creatures. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Table 2. Rank order of ten dialogues according to the ratios of dedicated acknowledgements, the ratios of  
general-purpose acknowledgements, and the counts of post-grounding acknowledgements (solicited 
acknowledgements and spontaneous acknowledgements) 
 
post-grounding acknowledgements 
dedicated 
acknowledgments 
general-purpose 
acknowledgments 
solicited spontaneous 
percentage rank percentage rank counts rank counts rank 
58.41% 1 10.90% 1 0 1 3 1 
62.02% 2 18.60% 2 0 1 4 2 
80.00% 3 19.40% 3 0 1 5 5.5 
81.32% 4 21.50% 4 0 1 5 5.5 
84.11% 5 25.20% 5 0 1 5 5.5 
84.95% 6 41.30% 6 0 1 5 5.5 
88.89% 7 41.80% 7 0 1 6 7 
88.99% 8 42.40% 8 1 8 7 8 
93.27% 9 48.30% 9 4 9.5 10 9.5 
93.33% 10 56.90% 10 4 9.5 10 9.5 
*Hatched cells are data of older dyads. 
 
5 Conclusion 
As a pilot study of the grounding styles of older 
dyads, we analyzed dialogue data featuring both 
older and younger dyads, and identified a certain 
contrast in grounding style that separates the two 
groups fairly clearly. In the style associated with 
older dyads, people use more dedicated 
acknowledgements than dual-functional ones, use 
more general-purpose acknowledgements than 
special-purpose ones, and use relatively many 
post-grounding acknowledgements. In the style 
associated with younger dyads, the opposite 
tendencies on the use of acknowledgements hold. 
On the basis of this contrast, we also discussed the 
implications of the adoption of the first grounding 
style, and conjectured that some of the negative 
stereotypes about conversations with older people 
may be based on this grounding style they adopt. 
Certainly, as the result of an exploratory study, all 
these observations are purely hypothetical. We 
only hope that this study has provided enough 
materials to set a stage for a further, more 
controlled comparison of grounding styles of older 
and younger dyads. 
 
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