Communication Yearbook 10

Margaret McLaughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135148515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Communication Yearbook annuals publish diverse, state-of-the-discipline literature reviews that advance knowledge and understanding of communication systems, processes, and impacts across the discipline. Sponsored by the International Communication Association, each volume provides a forum for the exchange of interdisciplinary and internationally diverse scholarship relating to communication in its many forms. This volume re-issues the yearbook from 1987.

I • Communication Reviews and Commentaries

1 • Speech Accommodation Theory: The First Decade and Beyond

Howard Giles • Anthony Mulac • James J. Bradac • Patricia Johnson

University of Bristol • University of California —Santa Barbara • University of Bristol

THE first publications concerning “speech accommodation theory” (SAT) emerged in 1973. Giles (1973) not only demonstrated the phenomenon of interpersonal accent convergence in an interview situation, but also introduced his “accent mobility” model in the context of a critique of some aspects of the Labovian (1966) paradigm (see also Bell, 1984). This was a blueprint for subsequent formulations addressing a greater diversity of speech levels (Giles & Powesland, 1975). To this end, and in that same year, Giles, Taylor, and Bourhis (1973) published a paper that confirmed empirically some fundamental ideas inherent in what subsequently was to be labeled SAT. In a bilingual context, they found that the more effort in convergence a speaker was perceived to have made, the more favorably that person was evaluated and the more listeners would converge back in turn. Moreover, a plethora of convergent strategies was discovered even in what for some would be described as a socially sterile laboratory setting. Since then, empirical and theoretical developments and consequences have been somewhat profuse, and particularly so in the 1980s (for example, Ball, Giles, & Hewstone, 1985; Giles, 1984). Hence, the aim of this state-of-the-art chapter is to present a concise overview of SAT achievements to date, to renovate some of its propositional components in the light of recent thinking, and to lay down some priorities for future research.

SAT, developed by Giles and associates, focuses on the social cognitive processes mediating individuals’ perceptions of the environment and their communicative behaviors. Its theoretical framework developed out of a wish to demonstrate the value and potential of social psychological concepts and processes for understanding the dynamics of speech diversity in social settings. It purports to clarify the motivations underlying, as well as the constraints operating upon, speech shifts during social interactions and the social consequences of these. Specifically, it originated in order to elucidate the cognitive and affective processes underlying speech convergence and divergence, although other speech strategies (for example, speech complementarity and speech competition) have come into its theoretical purview more recently.

Convergence has been defined as a linguistic strategy whereby individuals adapt to each other’s speech by means of a wide range of linguistic features, including speech rates, pauses and utterance length, pronunciations and so on. Divergence refers to the way in which speakers accentuate vocal differences between themselves and others. Both of these linguistic shifts may be either upward or downward, where the former refers to a shift in a societally valued direction and the latter refers to modifications toward more stigmatized forms.

Beyond these basic distinctions several more specific accommodative forms can be indicated. The complexity level increases. Thus in any interaction, convergence can be mutual (A—> <—B) and if mutual can result in style matching (A—> <—B) or, probably less commonly, style switching (A

B; A

B). Convergence can be nonmutual (A—>B). Both interactants can maintain their dissimilar styles, neither converging nor diverging (A B). Divergence can be mutual (<—A B—>) or nonmutual (<—A B). And one person can attempt to converge as the other diverges (< — A < — B). Further, convergence can refer to a speaker’s attempt to move toward the other’s manifest speech style (Seltig, 1983) or to a speaker’s attempt to move toward a style suggested by a belief, expectation, or stereotype regarding the other’s style. The response to a manifest style versus response to a belief about other’s style, and so on, distinction can be offered for divergence as well. Additionally, the distinction between partial and total convergence or divergence can be offered (Street, 1982). Thus, for example, a speaker initially exhibiting a rate of 50 words per minute can move to match exactly another speaker’s rate of 100 words per minute (total convergence) or can move to a rate of 75 words per minute (partial convergence). Finally, we can distinguish between unimodal and multimodal divergence or convergence. The former distinction indicates that a speaker can converge to or diverge from one aspect of the other’s speech, for example, rate, whereas the latter distinction indicates convergence or divergence at two or more levels, for example, rate and accent.

The central notion of the framework— its advantages relative to SAT’s theoretical competitors have been discussed elsewhere (Street & Giles, 1982) — is that during interaction individuals are motivated to adjust (or to accommodate) their speech styles as a strategy for gaining one or more of the following goals: evoking listeners’ social approval, attaining communicational efficiency between interactants, and maintaining positive social identities. In addition, it is the individual’s perception of the other’s speech that will determine his or her evaluative and communicative responses.

But, before proceeding perhaps we should ask: Are the various phenomena encompassed by speech accommodation worth theorizing about? What importance attaches to speech accommodation processes? Briefly, it is clear to us that the various forms of convergence and divergence can have important psychological and communicative consequences. For example, dialect divergence can increase or enhance the diverger’s sense of social identity (Bourhis & Giles, 1977). Or, to give another example, convergence to another’s dialect can lead persons to attribute to the converger the traits of friendliness, warmth, and so on (Coupland, 1985). And, of course, attributed personality characteristics can affect the attributer’s subsequent interactions with the converger. So it seems to us that understanding the structures and processes implicated in speech accommodation is a worthwhile goal. And not only are accommodation phenomena potentially consequential, they are ubiquitous; they pervade human interaction.

The theory has been developed via a number of social psychological principles. Speech convergence is considered primarily in terms of similarity attraction (Byrne, 1969), causal attribution (Heider, 1958), and speech divergence with respect to intergroup processes (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Consideration of these principles allows for explication of both the intentions thought to underlie speech shifts and the evaluations of them. This chapter presents an overview of the two speech strategies, convergence and divergence, with respect to antecedent motives and evaluative consequences. Speech convergence will be considered in terms of desire for social approval, situational constraints on its occurrence and evaluation, observers’ causal attributions that may be invoked to account for it, as well as the level of awareness necessary for its inception. Speech divergence, which has been explored empirically less often, is considered in terms of the interactional functions, identity maintenance, and cognitive organization (see Giles, Scherer, & Taylor, 1979). The chapter concludes with a more complete and refined set of SAT propositions than hitherto proposed relating to the determinants, functions, and social consequences of speech shifts. Yet it does more than this, as the latter also are reformulated in such ways as to take into account the theoretical implications of current research in some other relevant but independent areas of inquiry, particularly those of self-presentation and couple identity. Finally, some new theoretical and methodological priorities for the future are proposed.

Convergence

Convergence and Desire for Social Approval

SAT proposes that speech convergence be considered a reflection (often nonconscious) of a speaker’s or group’s need for social integration or identification with another. The theory has its basis in research on similarity attraction which, in its simplest form, suggests that as one person becomes more similar to another, this increases the likelihood that the second will like the first. Thus interpersonal convergence through speech is one of many strategies that may be adopted in order to become more similar to another. It involves the reduction of linguistic dissimilarities between two people in terms of most language features from dialects (Coupland, 1980) to nonverbal behaviors (von Raffler-Engel, 1979). Thus, for example, Welkowitz and Feldstein (1969, 1970) reported that dyadic participants who perceived themselves to be similar in terms of attitudes and personality converged durations of internal pauses (those within a conversational turn) and of switching pauses more than did those participants perceiving dissimilarity. Dyadic interactants who perceived themselves to be similar were more able and willing to coordinate and influence one another’s speech patterns and timing than other dyads, presumably because these perceived similar dyads were initially more positively oriented and more certain of one another (Byrne, 1971). In addition to pause duration, Welkowitz, Feldstein, Finkelstein, and Aylesworth (1972) found that dyadic participants perceiving themselves as similar converged vocal intensity more than subjects randomly paired.

The language choice of male and female interactants has demonstrated convergence also. Mulac, Wiemann, Yoerks, and Gibson (1983) assigned university students to problem-solving dyads, either same-sex or mixed-sex, with a partner whom they did not know well. Linguistic analyses indicated that a combination of 12 language features predicted interactant gender in same-sex, but not mixed-sex, dyads; in other words, mixed-sex dyadic participants appeared to have met “midway” linguistically. Another interesting example of convergence brought to our attention by Mary Evans (personal communication) is the tendency some balanced bilingual speakers have in even converging regularly toward the grammatical errors made by nonfluent second-language learners acquiring the other’s native tongue (Jones, 1984). Needless to say, this nonconscious and doubtless positively intended strategy on the part of the fluent speaker has the effect of retarding the nativelike proficiency of the second-language learner.

Increasing similarity along a dimension as important as communication is likely to increase a speaker’s attractiveness (Dabbs, 1969), his or her predictability (Berger & Bradac, 1982), intelligibility (Triandis, 1960), and interpersonal involvement (LaFrance, 1979) in the eyes of the recipient. In view of this, convergence may be best considered as a reflection of an individual’s desire for social approval in many instances. For example, Purcell (1984) observed Hawaiian children’s convergent shifts in prosodic and lexicogrammatical features depending on the likability of the particular peers present when talking together in small groups, and Putman and Street (1984) reported interviewee shifts in speech rate and duration when intending to sound likable to an interviewer. Similarly, Coupland (1984) found convergent speech shifts in the phonological variations of a travel agent when conferring in her office with clients of different socioeconomic status and education.

A compelling set of illustrations in like manner comes from a large-scale naturalistic study of code-switching in Taiwan by Berg (1985), who examined 8,392 interactions across many markets, department stores, shops, and banks. In general, the most common pattern of communication in these situations was mutual accommodation to the other’s dialect, the nature of which depended on the particular setting involved. For instance, customers would downwardly converge to salespeople in the market place and would receive upward convergence in return, but in banks (given the sociolinguistic and socioeconomic attributes of the salespeople there) customers would now upwardly converge to the clerks who would downwardly converge to them. Of particular interest to SAT is the continual finding that in many of these settings where customers, of course, hold the relative monetary reins, salespeople converged much more to customers than vice versa. Of course in times of commodity scarcity and economic hardship, one might expect the reverse pattern to be operative in view of the social approval (and even survival) motive.

An exception to the convergent style/social approval connection is the case in which a speaker “makes fun of” another by mocking his or her communicative behavior (see Basso, 1979). In this case, the speaker typically will signal the intention to mock the other’s style through the use of various meta-communicative devices. Kathryn Shields (personal communication) has observed Jamaican schoolteachers (who usually adopt a standardized form in the classroom) converging/mimicking their pupils’ creolized forms when the latter are deemed disruptive, inattentive, or lacking in academic effort. This suggests that one’s perception of a speaker’s intention is crucial to specifying the consequences of both convergence and divergence.

For affective reasons again, people converge to where they believe their partners are linguistically. For example, Bell (1982) reported that New Zealand broadcasters would read the same news phonologically quite differently depending on which socioeconomic bracket they thought their listening audience derived from (see also Seltig, 1985). Often of course we are quite accurate in pinpointing the linguistic attributes of our recipients, yet on other occasions we are quite wrong. Beebe (1981), for instance, found that Chinese Thai bilingual children would use Chinese phonological variants when being interviewed by an objectively sounding Standard Thai speaker who looked ethnically Chinese. Similarly, some Singaporeans’ and Australian immigrants’ attempts lexically, grammatically, and prosodically to match “upwardly” the speech of native English speakers may miscarry, and in other cases, native English speakers mismanage their downward convergent attempts toward what they believe Singaporeans and Aborigines sound like (Platt & Weber, 1984). It also should not escape notice that two of the cultural settings in which accommodative tendencies have been observed above are Oriental; the conviction that these sociolinguistic processes are really quite widespread begins to look viable.

From these examples it can be argued that speech convergence is often cognitively mediated by our stereotypes of how socially categorized others will speak (see Hewstone & Giles, 1986), and “foreigner talk” and speech to certain ethnic minorities and young children can be examplars of this. In the area of gender and communication there is some evidence (Mulac et al., 1983) that observers’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Overview
• Part I: Communication Reviews and Commentaries
• Part II: Information Systems
• Part III: Interpersonal Communication
• Part IV: Mass Communication
• Part V: Organizational Communication
• Part VI: Intercultural and Development Communication
• Part VII: Political Communication
• Part VIII: Instructional Communication
• Part IX: Health Communication
• Part X: Philosophy of Communication
• Part XI: Human Communication Technology
• Part XII: Popular Culture
• Part XIII: Public Relations
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor
• About the Authors