ACCOMMODATION THEORY

Irsalina Rachma ViramdaniKhusnen Khoirin Nada

The Founder

Howard Giles

Professor of linguistics andpsychology at the Universityof California, Santa Barbara.Giles developed the theory in 1973

Accommodation Theory

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is the way the speaker adjusting speech, vocal patterns, and/or gestures to accommodate the interlocutor in a certain communication.

Purpose

People change the way they speak to be better understand others to accommodate to their communication needs

Accommodation Theory

Speech Convergence

Downward Convergence

Upward Convergence

Mutual Convergence

Speech Divergence

Speech Convergence

• Speech convergence is the way the speakers move their speech closer toward each other

• There is a tendency for people to become more alike in terms of linguistic, prosodic or non-verbal features, including pronunciation, utterance length, pauses, speech rates, vocal intensities, as well as facial expressions and the "intimacy of their self-disclosures"

Downward Convergence

Downward convergence occurs when people in upper class (such as people with an RP) toning down their way of speech to speak to people in a lower-class

Upward Convergence

Upward convergence occurs when lower-class people trying to eliminate some of the stronger regional feature of their speech when they speak to the upper class

Mutual Convergence

Mutual convergence occurs when the speaker and the interlocutor adjust their speech toward each other

Speech Divergence

Speech divergence is the ways in which both speakers accentuate their verbal and non-verbal differences

Conclusion

The point of Communication Accommodation Theory is to be able to communicate with others affectively. Without it, problems with language barriers, age barriers, or understanding people clearly can be a result of failed communication accommodation