Searching for Understanding in the Language of Medical Consultation: Accommodation and the Use of Dialect Variants among Latino Patients

• Autores: Ashley Bennink
• Localización: Discourses in co(n)text: the many faces of specialised discourse / Magdalena Zabielska (ed. lit.), Emilia Wasikiewicz-Firlej (ed. lit.), Anna Szcezepaniak-Kozak (ed. lit.), 2015, ISBN 978-1-4438-7419-9, págs. 60-88
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Physician-patient communication during the medical interview is essential to the provision of quality care. Due to a desire to be understood to facilitate this conversation, or to be accepted by the physician, patients have a tendency to converge or accommodate their language 10 that of the physician. This need to accommodate language is even more important in communities where the doctor and the patient do not share a native tongue. For example, in the United States, it is common for Englishspeaking, non-Iatino doctors to interact in Spanish with non-Englishspeaking, Latino patients. Although it would be expected that Latino palients would accommodate their language to be better understood by the medical professional, we find that, in conversations where the native English-speaking doctors are speaking in Spanish to these patients, the patients at times fail to converge their language. In a preliminary study conducted in 2013 that examined the appearance of lexical dialect variants in the medical interview, it was found that there is a significant presence of these variants in the medical interview. Although the presence of these terms in a standard medical interview in which physician and patient share a native language does not pose a significant problem, when a language barrier exists, these lexical dialect variants can hinder the communication. This chapter describes the communication accommodation theory as it relates to the medical context and then discusses how factors such as mental scripts, health status, and sociological and demographic characteristics may play a role in the use of variants by Latino patients during the medical interview.