Communication accommodation competence: The nature and nurture of accommodative resources across the lifespan

•Accommodation theory offers a highly flexible framework for understanding social interaction.•The current collection provides methodological and theoretical advances.•Accommodation can be viewed as providing a unique perspective on issues of communicative competence.•Competence and accommodation are dynamic across the lifespan.•Accommodative resources that people possess, lack, and can learn, are critical to communicative successes and failures.

This Epilogue briefly reviews some themes present in this collection, and highlights its many contributions. We then look beyond the contributions of the Special Issue papers to consider the continued conceptual development of communication accommodation theory. We argue for re-conceptualizing CAT as a theory of competence, suggesting that accommodation competence is a developmental phenomenon built on the accumulation of accommodation resources and repertoires over the lifespan. We address contexts in which communicative resources are stretched and competent accommodation becomes difficult. The competence approach provides one useful avenue for future empirical and theoretical development of CAT.