Tag Archives | Dominance

Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups

Joseph Dippong

Sociological Science August 3, 2020
10.15195/v7.a12


Sociological research on vocal dynamics demonstrates that as actors engage in conversation, their vocal frequencies tend to converge over time. Previous scholars have theorized that patterns of vocal accommodation serve as a mechanism through which speakers non-consciously communicate perceptions of each other’s relative status. In this article I discuss existing evidence linking vocal accommodation to status perceptions. Next, I report results from a laboratory experiment in which I test the proposed causal link between status and vocal accommodation by randomly assigning members of dyadic task groups to occupy either a higher or lower status position and assessing patterns of vocal accommodation. Results support the theorized causal relationship between group status structure and vocal accommodation. I argue that, as an unobtrusive and non-conscious indicator of status, vocal accommodation is a valuable, yet underused tool for assessing group status structures in a wide variety of situations and regarding many substantive sociological questions.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Joseph Dippong: Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
E-mail: jdippong@uncc.edu

Acknowledgments: The research reported here was funded in whole under award W911NF-17-1-0008 from the U.S. Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory. The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory.

  • Citation: Dippong, Joseph. 2020. “Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups.” Sociological Science 7: 291-313.
  • Received: May 6, 2020
  • Accepted: June 8, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a12


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