Speech Accommodation Theory: The Theory Of Communication Accommodation Theory

The Theory of Communication Accommodation

Everyone has a unique speech style of their own and this talking style would change depending on infinite numbers of variables reasons such as the surroundings, the topic, the person you are talking to, how close you are and other factors. People can adjust their accent, pronunciation and gestures to interact with others. The theory of communication accommodation is an evolution of speech accommodation theory which developed by Howard Giles in 1973. This essay will explain the definition of communication accommodation and describe its applications in our daily life. It will then evaluate both strengths and shortcomings of communication accommodation theory.

Howard Giles, the professor of Communication,

For instance, people would speak slower in foreign languages rather than using their mother tongue or they would use simple words and phrases when talking to babies or children. In other words, people are able to adapt themselves to different kinds of situations.

There are two main accommodation processes in communication accommodation theory. One is ‘convergence’ which refers to people adjusting their communicative behaviours to minimize their social differences. The other one is ‘divergence’ which refers to people emphasis on the speech and gestural differences from their

There are three overaccommodation forms, which are sensory over-accommodation, dependency overaccommodation and intergroup over-accommodation. (Turner, West, Richard, 2010) The first one is sensory over-accommodation, it refers to the situation when a person tries to accommodate to someone who is linguistic or physical disability but overaccommodates it, the interlocutor may take the speaker’s adjustment behaviours as patronizing. The second one, dependency overaccommodation, is that when the addresser occupies the dominant position in the conversation, which means they place the listener in a lower-status position. This may make addressee more depend on the speaker for addresser’s higher status. Finally, intergroup overaccommodation is that people always categorize people into different groups and each group has their own traits of character. People use this general stereotype to define every single individual in this group instead of taking them each as a separate person and igonre unique characters on each individual. All these socially discrepancies in comprehension leads to these three forms of