Language Changes Implicit Associations Between Ethnic Groups and Evaluation in Bilinguals

How does the language one speaks influence one’s thoughts? This issue has been debated since the Sapir-Whorf linguistic
relativity hypothesis proposed that a language’s characteristics determine the thoughts of its speakers (Whorf, 1957). Although
it is an overstatement to claim that language determines thought (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003), there are numerous findings showing an influence of language structure on cognition. For example, research with monolingual speakers has found that color terms within a language influence color perception (Drivonikou et al., 2007; Winawer et al., 2007) and that people who speak languages that mark gender perceive inanimate objects as having characteristics typical of their grammatical gender (Boroditsky et al., 2003). In the study we report here, we did not look at the specific influence of language structure, but rather examined the way in which language use can selectively influence the accessibility of socially relevant associations.

In any case, our results demonstrate that language use can selectively influence the accessibility of socially relevant associations. More generally, our findings are consistent with the notion that language and culture are intricately linked, and that bilingual people may think about their social world in different ways, depending on their current language context.

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