The role of linguistic identity as a modulator of social attention

Recent research suggests that language plays a critical role in social categorization. Furthermore, recent findings have shown that social factors can modulate gaze-cueing of attention (GCA). In 2 Experiments (N = 96) we investigated whether GCA is modulated by the linguistic identity associated with facial stimuli. Italian native participants were first familiarized with 8 faces and heard 3 sentences associated with them; half of the faces were associated with Italian sentences and the other half with two unknown languages (Albanian, Exp.1; Basque, Exp.2). Then, in a GCA task, the faces were used as cueing stimuli. Participants were instructed to discriminate a target located in valid or invalid positions according to gaze direction. Finally, all faces were presented along with the same 24 sentences in a recognition phase. Results in recognition showed that language is a tool for face categorization. Moreover, results suggest that linguistic identity plays a role in GCA.