Exploring age-related conversational interaction

Does the way we interact in conversation changes as we get older? This paper presents a corpus-based study investigating this question by looking into agerelated differences in spontaneous spoken dialogue. Conversations from the Switchboard corpus were analysed using n-gram models, relating the communicative actions as encoded by dialogue acts to speaker age. Results show that older interlocutors generally address the conversation itself (rather than other topics) less than younger adults. Age differences are also reported on feedback strategies, most notably that even though younger interlocutors produce more backchannels overall, older interlocutors use backchannels more often when taking turns.