Grounding styles of aged dyads: an exploratory study

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.