Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to find conversational management strategies for overcoming asymmetries in dialogue through a study of conversations between native speakers (native situations) and between native speakers and learners of Japanese (contact situations). The episode boundary - a locus for creating a topic and negotiating introduction of a topic - was used to conduct quantitative analyses of native and contact situations from two different perspectives. The first analysis examined the frequency of positional types, while in correlation, the second approach examined the frequency of information units. The results indicate that in contact situations, participants tend to rely more heavily on responsive utterances and word repetition to show an anaphoric relationship. They also make more frequent use of topic markers, predicates and back channel cues when they start or terminate a topic.
