Can accent trump the other-race effect?

It is well documented a bias in memory recognition when participants have to decide whether they have seen a person before that belongs to a different ethnic group. At the same time, the language of a speaker influences the perception of their face. Recent evidence suggests that language and race interact in creating social categories. Here, we explored whether linguistic cues (i.e., accent) influence the perception of other race faces. Specifically, we aim to investigate whether a native or foreign accent affect the perception of an other-race (Asian) face by assigning them as in/out-group members. 54 participants completed a perceptual priming paradigm which consisted in 4 phases: Priming Task (see Fig1), Training Phase (where faces were associated with an accent), Post-training Priming Task (identical to the first phase) and finally the recognition phase (where participants saw new and old faces and have to decide if they had previously seen them). In a second experiment with another pool of 55 participants, everything remained the same except that the training phase accompanied flags instead of voices. Results showed a general other-race effect (ORE) in both pre- and post-training for both the voiced and flag conditions. The ORE was also reflected in the higher recognition accuracy for the Caucasian faces when compared to Asian faces un both experiments.