Can Faces Prime a Language?

Bilinguals have two languages that are activated in parallel. During speech production, one of these languages must be selected on the basis of some cue. The present study investigated whether the face of an interlocutor can serve as such a cue. Spanish-Catalan and Dutch-French bilinguals were first...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological science 2015-09, Vol.26 (9), p.1343-1352
Main Authors: Woumans, Evy, Martin, Clara D., Vanden Bulcke, Charlotte, Van Assche, Eva, Costa, Albert, Hartsuiker, Robert J., Duyck, Wouter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Bilingual people
Bilingualism
Catalan language
Cognitive psychology
Cues
Dutch language
Face
Face priming
Facial Recognition
Female
French language
Humans
Language
Language cues
Lexical access
Male
Multilingualism
Priming
Simulation
Spanish language
Speech
Speech production
Words
Young Adult
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Summary:Bilinguals have two languages that are activated in parallel. During speech production, one of these languages must be selected on the basis of some cue. The present study investigated whether the face of an interlocutor can serve as such a cue. Spanish-Catalan and Dutch-French bilinguals were first familiarized with certain faces, each of which was associated with only one language, during simulated Skype conversations. Afterward, these participants performed a language production task in which they generated words associated with the words produced by familiar and unfamiliar faces displayed on-screen. When responding to familiar faces, participants produced words faster if the faces were speaking the same language as in the previous Skype simulation than if the same faces were speaking a different language. Furthermore, this language priming effect disappeared when it became clear that the interlocutors were actually bilingual. These findings suggest that faces can prime a language, but their cuing effect disappears when it turns out that they are unreliable as language cues.
ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1177/0956797615589330