Hispanic/Latino(a) Immigrant Acculturation and U.S. American Native English Speakers’ Intergroup Perceptions and Attitudes: Accommodation, Social Attraction, and Anxiety

Abstract

Guided by communication accommodation theory (CAT; Giles, 1970, 2016) and the acculturation framework (Berry, 1980, 2011), this study used a 3 (social attributions: positive, negative, neutral) x 4 (accommodation/acculturation strategies) experimental design to explore English-speaking, U. S. participants’ judgments of and behavioral intentions toward nonnative- English-speaking immigrant targets. The immigrant target’s cultural and linguistic adaptation strategies were manipulated to create four accommodation/acculturation strategies: high accommodation/assimilation, accommodation/integration, nonaccommodation/separation, nonaccommodation/marginalization. Analysis explored the main and interaction effects of the independent variable conditions, as well as the indirect effect of these conditions on willingness to communicate with and accommodate to the target through perceived accommodation, social attraction, and intergroup communication anxiety. Overall, the target’s accommodation/acculturation strategy significantly affected participants’ inferences about the target’s motives, as well as their judgments of and willingness to engage the target, and their intergroup perceptions of the target’s ethnolinguistic group. As expected, more assimilative and accommodative communicative and linguistic behaviors were associated with more positive participant responses than the nonaccommodative and separated and marginalized targets. The main effects of the social attribution conditions, as well as the social attribution by accommodation/acculturation interaction effect, was non-significant. Theoretically, the current study advances intergroup and intercultural communication research by demonstrating the complementary functions of both communication accommodation theory and the acculturation framework. Incorporating CAT into the acculturation framework illuminates the ways in which variations in the degree of psychological identification with home and host cultures may be manifest in communication behaviors. The current study also contributes to the theoretical development of inferred motive, extending this construct into an otherwise unstudied context between native and nonnative English speakers. Lastly, the indirect effects of perceived accommodation, social attraction, and intergroup communication anxiety suggest mechanisms through which interactions between native and nonnative English speakers can be improved.