Cognitive implications of language as a cue for social categorization

The identity of the interlocutor is an essential cue for successful communication. A sentence like 'I have a large tattoo on my back' could be considered credible if made by an adult but ironic if made by a child. External cues, such as age or race, are considered fundamental for social categorization, influencing the way we perceive the members of that group. Here, we focus on another cue that has received less attention. This is the case for the language (or accent) used by the interlocutor, which provides a huge amount of social information. We explored two different aspects. The first concerns the analysis of the power of language as a cue for social categorization. Our critical aim here was to investigate whether language automatically functions as a cue for social categorization even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic group, as is the case in bilingual communities. The second aspect refers to the consequences of the categorization based on language on message evaluation and on lower-level cognitive processes, such as visual attention. Specifically, we investigated whether the inferences that the listener makes about his interlocutor according to the language he/she speaks modulate message evaluation and their gaze-cueing orienting.