Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) posits that an individual's goals drive their communication behavior.
A 4 (communication accommodation: language congruence, ethnic congruence, language and ethnic congruence, and no accommodation) × 2 (focus of communication accommodation: intercultural vs. interpersonal) factorial between-subject experimental design was employed using videotaped hotel check-in scenarios as experimental stimuli.
The findings suggest that consumers respond to communication accommodation strategies with increased felt pleasure, arousal, and dominance.
Furthermore, accommodation strategies contributed to the perceived symbolic value of the service encounter, especially when employees expressed the intercultural focus of communication accommodation practices.
Communication processes were also content analyzed by two independent raters using a priori criteria from communication accommodation theory (clarity, syntax, complexity, explicitness, and staying on topic).
While the data supported the new gender-linked language model, no effects were found for predictions also made regarding communication accommodation or gender identity salience.
There's real science to back this up: it's called communication accommodation theory and it posits that when people interact they adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures, to accommodate to others.
Communication strategies were analyzed with criteria derived from Communication Accommodation Theory that included being clear, using medical syntax, using ethnic specific syntax, being explicit, and staying on topic when discussing pain.
Elsewhere in the academic forest, social psychologists have identified what they call "communication accommodation", where the accents of partners in a conversation tend to converge when they're attempting to build alliances, and diverge where they want to distinguish themselves from each other.
This area of study, which has been going on for several decades and is known as communication accommodation theory, has previously revealed that people of lower social status unconsciously alter their nonverbal vocal patterns to sound more like people of higher status, while those of higher status don't budge much.
