Blinded by the accent review

Language, beginning in prehistoric times, has been key to distinguishing between different societies. It was a vital tool for separating the Sumerians from the Egyptians and so forth. Well, that initiative strength of language is still true today, but only to some extent. With the vast migration and mixing of cultures over the centuries, language, alone, has weakened in terms of being a mere indication of “ethnicity” (Rakic, Steffens, & Mummendey, 2011, pg. 18). In the study, “Blinded by the Accent! The Minor Role of Looks in Ethic Categorization”, researchers Tamara Rakic, Melanie C. Steffens, and Amelie Mummendey, examined other factors, such as “looks” and “accents”, as possible indicators of social categorization. Being that the study was produced in Germany, researchers used, through a series of pretests, a set of fluent and distinct Germans and Italians to conduct their experiments, with insight that Italians and Germans were “popular and easily recognizable” (Rakic et al, 2011). The overall purpose of the experiment was to test whether looks or accents, or both in combination, actually had an effect on social categorization, or holistically, ethnicity. Therefore, two experiments had to be conducted. In Experiment 1, Italian versus German “looks” alone were tested by presenting participants with visual images of both Italians and Germans, with visual subscripts of possible statements made by the Italians or Germans. Then they were asked to match the face with the correct image. In the same experiment, these same participants were presented with only auditory stimuli of German and Italian accents and then asked to again match the voice with its respective image. As a result, neither looks alone nor accents alone had an effect on social categorization, which supported their hypothesis. In Experiment 2, however, both auditory and visual stimuli were simultaneously presented to participants in randomization. (For example, some Italian auditory may be