Listening Behavior in Japan and the United States

This entry describes the verbal listening styles found among speakers of Japanese and speakers of English in the United States. Speakers of these languages will hold implicit assumptions about appropriate listening behavior, and differences in these models of communication may have an impact during intercultural conversations. Japanese listeners provide verbal listening tokens that normally overlap a speaker's talk, a pattern that differs slightly from that of English speakers in the United States, who provide listener tokens in pauses or near turn transition points in the speaker's talk. Attention to listening behavior contributes to the demystification of social concepts such as empathy, interpretations of which often form the basis for ethnic stereotyping.