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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 23, 2025

Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

Published on: February 26, 2020

Language as a cue for social categorization in bilingual communities.

Anna Lorenzoni¹, Mikel Santesteban², Francesca Peressotti¹

¹Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italia.

|November 2, 2022

Summary

Bilinguals automatically categorize people by language, even when multiple languages are spoken. This social categorization based on language occurs even in multilingual communities.

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Sociolinguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Social categorization is a fundamental cognitive process.
Language is a key social identity marker.
The automaticity of language-based social categorization in bilinguals remains under-investigated.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if language acts as a social categorization dimension among bilingual individuals.
To determine if this categorization occurs even when languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic context.

Main Methods:

Utilized a 'Who said what?' memory confusion paradigm with bilingual participants from the Basque Country (Spain) and Veneto (Italy).
Participants encoded faces paired with auditory sentences in two languages (Spanish/Basque and Italian/Venetian).
Tested recall accuracy by presenting sentences and asking participants to identify the associated face.

Main Results:

High error rates were observed in identifying faces associated with spoken sentences.
Crucially, participants were significantly more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from different language categories.
This indicates a strong tendency to group individuals based on the language they speak.

Conclusions:

Language serves as an automatic dimension for social categorization in bilingual individuals.
This process occurs irrespective of the languages coexisting within a single sociolinguistic environment.
Findings highlight the pervasive influence of language on social perception and group formation.