Accommodation

The modification of your speech style in accordance with or in response to that of others. This may be a way of attending to what you believe to be your listener’s ability to understand, and/or to your respective role relationships and task-specific aims. Your modifications may also be the result of patterns within your conversation: questions that need an answer, pauses that need filling, summaries that assume agreement, registers that you converge or diverge from and so on.

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