will examine, those who classify themselves as SAE speakers) feel
perfectly empowered to reject their responsibility, and to demand that a
person with an accent carry the majority of the burden in the
communicative act. Conversely, when an SAE speaker comes in contact
with another *SAE speaker who is nonetheless incoherent or unclear, the
first response is not to reject the communicative burden, but to take other
factors into consideration and work harder at establishing understanding.
The whole concept of units of conversation in which two partners work
toward mutual comprehension assumes a certain state of mind on the part
of the participants, and to an extent, the question of skill. Intercultural
competence is as crucial to successful communication as underlying
motivation, solidarity or hostility. Work in accommodation theory (Gallois
et al. 2004; Giles 1984; Giles et al. 1991) suggests that a complex
interplay of linguistic and psychological factors will establish the
predisposition to understand or to refuse to understand.
Thakerar, Giles and Cheshire (1982) conducted a series of empirical
tests to examine accommodation behavior; they were not working directly
with L2 accented speech, but their findings are generally typical of such
studies, which verify something known intuitively: listeners and speakers
will work harder to find a communicative middle ground and foster
mutual intelligibility when they are motivated, socially and
psychologically, to do so. Conversely, when the speaker perceives that the
act of accommodating or assimilating linguistically may bring more
disadvantages than advantages, in in-group terms, he or she may diverge
even farther from the language of the listener.
Degree of accentedness, whether from interference of a native language
other than English, or a socially or geographically marked language
variety, cannot predict the level of an individual’s competency in the target
language or skill as a communicator. In fact, high degrees of competence
are often attained by persons with especially strong foreign language
accents. Nevertheless, accent will sometimes be an issue in
communication, especially in the case of non-native speakers of English
who are in the early stages of learning the language
Accent, in the general way it has been used here, can sometimes be an
impediment to communication even when all parties involved in the
communicative act are willing, even eager, to understand. In many cases,
however, breakdown of communication is due not so much to accent as it
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