Abstract This paper offers a comparison between topic openings of female Chinese and Japanese native speakers (CNS and JNS) in their native language conversations. The data consist of -minute audio-and video-taped dyadic conversations by CNS pairs and JNS pairs. The results show that both CNS and JNS demonstrate patterns of topic opening: ( ) immediate opening and ( ) gradual opening. A significant difference between CNS and JNS was found in the distribution of these patterns. In CNS conversation, the distributions of ( ) and ( ) are % and % respectively. In JNS conversation, they are % and %. That is, in CNS conversation, the topic opening process tends to be shorter than that in JNS conversation, where topics are opened gradually through negotiation. Keywords : Chinese-Japanese comparison, topic opening, process analysis, interaction, unacquaintance Tannen,
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