Using Accent to Induce Cultural Frame-Switching

Using Accent to Induce Cultural Frame-Switching Morteza Dehghani, Peter Khooshabeh, Lixing Huang, Angela Nazarian, Jonathan Gratch morteza,khooshabeh,lhuang,nazarian,gratch@ict.usc.edu Institute for Creative Technologies University of Southern California 12015 Waterfront Drive Playa Vista, CA 90094 Abstract Language plays a crucial role in the formation and categoriza- tion of one’s ethnic identity. Recent work on linguistic accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent serves as a mean- ingful ethnic category indicator. In this paper, we examine whether accent can be used to implement socio-cultural mark- ers. We investigate whether the accent of a virtual character, as a marker for culture, can cause cultural frame-shifts in indi- viduals. We report an experiment, performed among bicultural and monocultural individuals, in which we test the above hy- pothesis. Our results show that accent can have a socio-cultural effect on people’s cognition. Keywords: accent, culture, frame-switching, biculturalism Introduction There is a substantial amount of research focusing on the in- fluence of language on human cognition. Language, at its core, is a cognitive tool that helps us construct shared mean- ings, categorize our knowledge, and thus piece together the various associative networks of collective experiences to form our perception of the world around us. According to the Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), the grammar of a lan- guage and the manner in which the language is processed can provide a glance into the implicit organization of knowledge in that culture. This inherent influence is reflected in the be- lief that the grammatical structure of a language shapes our interactions due to the speakers inherent exposure to certain observations and mental representations, otherwise known as the principle of linguistic relativity (Chiu, Leung, & Kwan, The results from previous studies with bilingual partici- pants support the use of language as a means of activating as- sociated cultural constructs. For instance, Chinese bilinguals randomly assigned to respond in Chinese reported more col- lective self-statements in open-ended self-descriptions, lower self-esteem, and more agreement with Chinese cultural views (Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002). These qualities are in line with traits commonly associated with Eastern collectivist cul- tures. The findings also suggest that cultural identities may be stored in separate knowledge structures and activated by the associated language. Marian and Neisser (2000) exam- ined the retrieval of autobiographical memories in bicultural individuals and found that memories become more accessi- ble when the language used at retrieval matched the language used at encoding. In other words, Russian-English bilin- guals were able to remember more events from the Russian- speaking period of their lives when they responded in Rus- sian and more experiences from the English-speaking period of their lives when they responded in English. In their meta-analysis of cross-cultural studies of self- enhancement, Heine and Hamamura (2007) point out the lim- itations and confounds in existing research regarding whether language can independently prime a cultural mindframe. Lee, Oyserman, and Bond (2010) attended to these short- comings in their study by exploring the effect of experi- mentally manipulated language use on value endorsements and self-descriptions. By unobtrusively manipulating lan- guage as a prime, they found that bilingual participants ran- domly assigned to use English reported significantly more self-enhancing social comparative judgements than those us- ing Chinese. In addition, English users demonstrated more social distancing after under-performance and standardized their failure in the context of the behavior of their peers in order to protect their positive self-regard. This is in line with the expected behavior of someone from an individualist culture and touches on the work done by Tesser (2000) and Kwan et al. (2004) regarding the mechanisms employed to protect, augment, or maintain self-esteem.The above findings also support the claim that societies are socialized for both in- dividual and collective mindsets, but responses are dependent on the cultural mindset salient at the moment of self-reflection (Lee et al., 2010). This literature demonstrates the cognitive implications of experimentally manipulating language as a prime to prompt a shift in an individuals cultural mindset. The findings from these studies support the use of language as a marker for cul- ture, however, in this paper we aim tease apart the specific aspects of language that act as cultural markers, e.g., by ma- nipulating accents. Ethnolinguistic identity theory indicates that language plays a crucial role in the formation and cate- gorization of one’s ethnic identity (Giles, Bourhis, & Taylor, 1977). Rakiˇc, Steffens, and Mummendey (2011a) compared the strength of vocal accents compared to facial visual ap- pearance as indicators for ethnic categorization. They found that not only did accent serve as a meaningful ethnic cate- gory indicator, but participants also overlooked visual stim- uli, such as facial features typically associated with a culture, in the presence of this more meaningful auditory information (Rakiˇc et al., 2011a). In other words, sociopsychological pro- cesses were a more salient tool in determining memorability than objective stimulus features. In a later study, they exam- ined the effect of accent workplace context. Job applicants with a standard German accent were compared to those with