Does linguistic identity influence social attention? It depends on the perceived 'status' of the language

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer (i.e., gaze-cueing of attention). Recent evidence has shown that social factors modulate this phenomenon. At the same time, recent evidence indicates that language is a cue for social categorization. Here, we explored the role of categorization based on languages perceived differently in terms of social status, on the gaze-cueing effect (GCE). Italian native participants were first familiarized with eight Caucasian faces together with auditory sentences. In Experiment 1, half of the faces were associated with Italian (native language), and the other half with the unknown Albanian language (N = 48). In Experiment 2, the unknown language was Basque (N = 48). Participants then performed a gaze-cueing task (i.e., they discriminated a target located in congruent or incongruent positions, according to gaze direction) using the faces as cueing stimuli. Finally, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants had to determine which face uttered each sentence. The results indicated that participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language than from the other language category, highlighting the role of language in social categorization. Moreover, results revealed a greater GCE for ‘Italian-faces’ versus ‘Albanian-faces’ (Exp.1), while similar gaze-cueing effects were observed between ‘Italian’ and ‘Basque-faces’ (Exp.2), suggesting that differences in perceived social status ascribed to the two unknown languages have modulated the GCE. These findings revealed the impact of language as a social cue on the GCE, suggesting that social attention is sensitive to the language of our interlocutors.