| To test hypotheses derived from communication accommodation theory and recent research on the social psychology of deviance, Tibetans in the Indian diaspora of Dharamshala rated facets of their cultural identity as well as certain audio-taped target others who represented different levels of Tibetan prototypicality. The latter were devised to sound like normative (Central Tibetan dialect mixed with some Hindi words), pro-normative (pure honorific Tibetan), and anti-normative (mostly Hindi with some Tibetan words) speakers. The dependent variables included scales of ingroup identification, perceptions of target prototypicality, perceptions of target identity support and threat, social evaluations of targets, and participants' anticipated and reported communication accommodation and nonaccommodation to these target speakers.;Results from a Pilot Study (N = 178) indicated high or acceptable Cronbach's Alpha reliabilities for most of the (established and new) scales and also indicated that respondents perceived the target speakers as intended by the researcher (i.e., the taped-manipulation worked effectively). In the light of this, a modest number of adjustments to these scales were then made. Adopting these in the Main Study (N = 170), and as predicted, targets' level of perceived prototypicality influenced the extent to which Tibetans communicatively accommodated to them in a host environment. The pro-normative speaker was accommodated more to than the normative speaker who, in turn, was accommodated more to than the anti-normative speaker. However, no interaction effect, as had been predicted, between levels of Tibetan identification and target prototypicality emerged. While findings, as predicted, supported mediating effects of perceptions of identity support and positive evaluations on intragroup accommodation, they did not provide support for any mediating effects of perceptions of identity threat and negative evaluations on intragroup nonaccommodation. The results from a limited number of taped interviews suggested that nonaccommodation may be less evident in this (and perhaps other) cultural contexts. A concluding chapter discussed these findings and their relevance for communication accommodation theory, and suggestions for future research as well as limitations of the present investigation were presented. |
