Communicative Accommodation in Chinese Doctor–Patient Interaction

In verbal interactions, communicative accommodation refers to the adjustments made by interlocutors to achieve specific communicative goals. This concept is particularly valuable in research, especially in institutional discourse such as doctor-patient interactions, where effective communication is crucial. Using the theoretical framework of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and applying Conversation Analysis (CA), this study examines how doctors adapt their communication with patients during preoperative conversations. Analysis of a corpus of Chinese preoperative conversations reveals that doctors use communicative approaches such as code-switching, pronoun shifts, compassionate understanding, conversational structure adjustments, and comprehension alignment to accommodate patients. These authentic data empirically support and exemplify the accommodation strategies proposed by CAT, highlighting the multifunctionality of accommodative behaviors and their sensitivity to interaction contexts. Our findings indicate that the same accommodation behaviors can be interpreted differently in varying contexts and categorized into different strategies. Additionally, specific accommodation strategies are associated with particular sequence positions. Overall, doctors' communicative accommodation behaviors primarily serve two goals: bridging cognitive differences and fostering emotional connections. Our findings thus contribute nuanced insights into the dynamic interplay of cognitive and emotional dimensions within medical communication.