Outgroup faces hamper word recognition
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Outgroup faces hamper word recognition Simone Sulpizio1,2 · Eduardo Navarrete3 Received: 9 October 2018 / Accepted: 6 July 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The present study explores socio-cultural priming in native-language processing. Caucasian Italian native speakers completed a written lexical decision task. Written stimuli were preceded by either a prime “white” face (ingroup condition) or a prime “black” face (outgroup condition). Face priming effects were observed in three experiments using different stimuli. Participants were slower in categorizing words, but not non-words, when preceded by an outgroup face than by an ingroup face. Several psycholinguistic variables were manipulated to localize the levels of processing that are affected by socio-cultural prime. The lack of effect with non-word items excludes the possibility that the face priming effect arises at perceptual or attentive levels of processing. In addition, we observed that while the face priming effect does not interact with lexical dimensions, it does interact with a semantic dimension such as imageability. The results indicate that social categories extracted from faces may modulate lexico-semantic processing. Interestingly, such a modulation would occur in the context of a quick and automatic process like visual word recognition in a person’s native language.
Introduction In most of our everyday communication, we speak and listen to our interlocutor while we look at their face. Both linguistic and visual cues are important for good linguistic communication: as listeners, we automatically and effectively integrate these two types of information during speech perception (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976; Munhall, Jones, Callan, Kuratate & Vatikiotis-Bateson, 2004). Facial features may trigger multiple types of relevant information about our interlocutor, such as their age, social identity, and cultural environment. But, does the information triggered by the face have an impact on the language system? And if this is the case, what linguistic level(s) are more sensitive to the information coming from the face? In the present work, we address these questions by investigating the impact
* Eduardo Navarrete [email protected] http://colab.psy.unipd.it 1
Facoltà di Psicologia, Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Italy
2
Centro di Neurolinguistica e Psicolinguistica, Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Italy
3
Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padua, Italy
of information about social categories on the recognition of printed words. To this aim, we ran a series of priming experiments in which participants identified words preceded by a face from their own or from a different social group. Linguistic research investigating the impact of facial features on language processing is scanty and mainly focused on bilingualism. Investigating the effect of culture images on the processing of a
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