"The accent is much more important than the way a person looks," said Dr. Tamara Rakic."The classification into social categories, like for instance ethnicity, happens spontaneously and helps us to understand and simplify the complex world and to enable us to deal more easily with complexity," Rakic added.
In their current studies Dr. Rakic and her colleagues Professor Dr. Melanie Steffens and Professor Dr. Amilie Mummendey tested empirically for the first time the influence of language on ethnic categorization.
"With our language we are not only transmitting information. Language itself provides a lot of information about the person speaking. Those who have an accent give away their ethnic background as well", Dr. Rakic said.
They showed to the participants the photos of German and Italian looking persons together with a written statement of the persons depicted. Then the participants had to assign the statements to the depicted persons. Mix-ups were particularly common within the groups of German and Italian looking persons. Statements made by German looking persons however were not wrongly assigned to Italian looking persons (or vice versa).
Source:MedIndia
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