Accent Accommodation in the Job Interview

Abstract

Using the framework of Communication Accommodation Theory, this study investigated the extent to which job applicants objectively and subjectively altered their accents to converge to or diverge from the speech style of the interviewer. Forty-eight male and 48 female job applicants participated in two interviews for a casual research assistant position. In one interview, the interviewer had a broad Australian English accent, and in the other one, the interviewer had a cultivated accent. Applicants showed broader accents with broad-accented interviewers than with cultivated-accented interviewers. Applicants did not converge to the cultivated-accented interviewers, however, and male job applicants were more likely than were females to diverge from the cultivated-accented interviewers. There were also discrepancies between objectively rated changes to applicants' accents and their subjective judgments about the extent of accent accommodation.

When it matters how you pronounce it: The influence of regional accents on job interview outcome

“…Our data show that in the context of a job interview, regional accent presence alone was enough to trigger negative impressions of those speakers. Non-standard accent speakers speaking their native language were possibly seen as deliberately diverging from the standard accent that is appropriate in a job context (see also Willemyns, Gallois, Callan, & Pittam, 1997; for different gender-based preferences for accommodation). This deliberate diverging might be interpreted as a lack of effort (Giles & Powesland, 1975) and should therefore result in the most negative evaluation of a speaker because it is assumed that the speaker is able to accommodate but unwilling to do so, hence not obeying given norms (Simard et al, 1976).…”

Characterizing the Linguistic Chameleon: Personal and Social Correlates of Linguistic Style Accommodation

“…Instances of asymmetrical convergence in association with social power have been observed across a wide range of communication behaviors and situations. These include interviewees converging their speech style toward that of their interviewers during employment interviews (Willemyns, Gallois, Callan, & Pittam, 1997), witnesses in courtrooms accommodating their language use to that of the questioning legal professional (Gnisci, 2005), and students accommodating their verbal and nonverbal behaviors to academic faculty members (Jones, Gallois, Callan, & Barker, 1999). CAT predicts that individuals in low-power roles will be motivated to seek social approval from their higher-power partner, driving their greater convergence (Giles et al, 1991).…”

A Robust Framework for Estimating Linguistic Alignment in Twitter Conversations

“…Power relationships are an important source of di↵erential accommodation, with less powerful conversants generally accommodating more to more powerful conversants. Prominent examples of such asymmetric accommodation include interviews and jury trials [48,23,14]. Additionally, factors such as gender, likability, respect, and attraction all interact with the magnitude of accommodation [1,36].…”

“…This communication accommodation [20] is a pervasive part of human interactive behavior, arising in many di↵erent dimensions of interaction, including gesture, posture, tone, and language use [11,3,21,32,26,9]. From a scientific perspective, greater degrees of accommodation can signal power relationships or a liation [48,23,14], and from an engineering perspective, interactive agents that accommodate (or "mirror") are seen as friendlier and more human [35,33]. One of the most important and well-studied forms of accommodation is linguistic alignment, in which conversational partners align aspects of their communicative style and content to one another.…”