The use of language as a cultural prime

Whether language influences thought has been the subject of much debate. According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), the language one speaks influences how he/she thinks. Bicultural individuals are known to frame-switch

between cultural mindsets with which they are familiar (Luna, Ringberg, & Peracchio, 2008). Lee, Oyserman and Bond (2010) defined cultural mindsets as “a mental

interpretation or cognitive schema containing culture-congruent content, procedures, and goals” (p. 785), for example, an individualist or collectivist cultural mindset. Different cultural mindsets have been shown to be evoked when bilingual and/or bicultural participants speak in the language with which the concepts are associated (Pavlenko, 2003; Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002). For example, English is thought to evoke an individualist mindset, as English-speaking people have been shown to be more individualistic than people from other societies (including other Western

Europeans who speak different languages; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002); on the other hand, Chinese culture represents a collectivist mindset (Lee et al., 2010).

Priming bilingual participants in two different languages, when performing identical or similar tasks, has been shown to elicit differences in responses, such as verbal recall of academic information in Spanish and English (Marian & Fausey, 2006) and autobiographical memory in Russian and English (Marian & Neisser, 2000).

Marian and Neisser (2000) prompted Russian-English bilinguals, who had immigrated to the United States at the mean age of 14.2, using 16 pairs of cue words (e.g. birthday,

frightened, holiday and laughing; with the equivalent Russian translations). They found

that when participants were cued in Russian, they mentioned more memories from the Russian-speaking part of their lives; conversely, more memories from the English- speaking part of their lives were mentioned when cued in English.

A similar phenomenon was observed when Chinese-English bilinguals were asked ambiguous questions with two or more possible answers (e.g. “Name a statue of someone standing with a raised arm while looking into the distance”). Participants were more likely to name the Statue of Mao when asked in Chinese and the Statue of Liberty when asked in English, thus suggesting a connection between cultural and linguistic contexts (Marian & Kaushanskaya, 2007). Priming participants using culturally- significant icons of Chinese culture and American culture (e.g. the Great Wall vs. the Capitol building) also led to bicultural frame-switching among Hong Kong Chinese participants, whereby they exhibited more confidence in external attributions, a characteristic of collectivistic culture, when speaking Chinese (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000).

Chinese-born Canadians who were assigned to respond in Chinese provided more collectivistic self-statements in open-ended self-descriptions, lower self-esteem on the Rosenberg scale, and more agreement with Chinese cultural views than the control participants or Chinese-born Canadians assigned to respond in English (Ross et al., 2002). In a clinical setting, Chinese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong used more interpersonal language when describing depressive symptoms in Chinese than in English (Ting & Dueck, 2006).

Further, Pavlenko (2003) also found cross-linguistic differences when Russian- English bilinguals were recalling scenes from videos shot in Kiev, Ukraine, and Ithaca, New York, in which a man comes to sit down within close proximity to a woman on a bench. Participants were prompted either in Russian or English, and described either the video shot in Kiev or the video shot in Ithaca. Participants were found to mention concepts such as “privacy” and “personal space” that are present in English but not in Russian more frequently when speaking English than when speaking Russian.

These findings demonstrate that language can be used to prime certain cultural mindsets in people, which in turn suggests that individuals adapt their thoughts and behaviour as they shift from one language or culture to another. However, it is not known whether priming participants in languages that come from individualist (English and German) and collectivist cultures (Chinese) can lead to a cultural shift, whereby fixation patterns and verbal descriptions can be altered during face perception tasks.

Thus, in the current study, we prime Malaysian Chinese and Austrian Caucasian participants in Mandarin and German, respectively, and compare the resulting looking and description patterns. If the cultural hypothesis is correct, we would predict

language priming to impact on the Malaysian Chinese participants’ description and looking strategy, but not the Austrian Caucasians’. Conversely, if the facial information hypothesis is correct, we would predict that participants look at and describe facial features that are most diagnostic for identification for each face ethnicity.

If cross-cultural cognitive differences drive the differences in looking and description styles, we predict that priming bilingual participants with cultural cues related to Chinese (collectivist) or English (individualist) cultures will cause differences in face processing style, leading to more configural looking strategy (focus on the nose)

in the Chinese cultural prime condition and a more featural looking strategy (focus on the eyes and mouth) in the English cultural prime condition. However, in the

comparison group of Austrian Caucasians, we would predict no, or a much reduced, shift in cognitive styles, since both English and German are languages from

individualistic cultures.

In this study we use a novel cultural-priming method to prime bilingual Malaysian Chinese/English participants to describe East Asian and White Caucasian faces in English and Chinese, as well as a comparison group of bilingual Austrian German/English participants who will describe the same faces in English and German. We will examine our findings in relation to the facial information hypothesis and the cultural explanation. If the facial information hypothesis is supported, fixation patterns and verbal descriptions should follow similar patterns based on what is useful for identifying faces. On the other hand, if the cultural explanation is supported, language priming should influence fixation and verbal description patterns, whereby participants use more featural processing when speaking in English and vice versa.

We will describe in Study 1 the Methods and Results from the Malaysian Chinese data, and the same for the Austrian data in Study 2.