Dispute and Language Expertise : Analysis of Bilingual Couple Talk in Japanese

Marriage involving two cultures and languages may involve many communication problems. This study examines one particular problem in conversation, dispute, between Japanese wives and their American husbands who communicate in Japanese. The analytical focus is on sequences where problematic talk is related to the participants' such language identities as native/non-native speaker and expert/novice categories. This study shows that dispute in intercultural marriage is in some cases due to language expertise and not based on the second language speaker's disfluency or differences between the speakers' cultural backgrounds.