Do people remember what is prototypical? : The role of accent-religion intersectionality for individual and category memory

Rakić, Tamara and Steffens, Melanie C. and Sazegar, Atena (2020) Do people remember what is prototypical? : The role of accent-religion intersectionality for individual and category memory. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 39 (4). pp. 476-494. ISSN 0261-927X

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Abstract

Evidence suggests that accents can be typically more powerful in activating ethnicity categorization than appearance. Concurrently, some social categories, such as ethnicity, can be linked with other categories, such as religion. We investigate how people categorize those who belong to a (mis)matching pair of categories? In the present study we investigated Germans’ categorization of women either wearing a headscarf (Muslim religious symbol), or not, and speaking either standard German or German with an Arabic accent. The “Who Said What?” paradigm and multinomial modelling yielded that category memory, indicative of subtyping, was best for non-prototypical targets (i.e., headscarf and standard German accent, no headscarf and Arabic accent). In contrast, ingroup targets (no headscarf and standard German accent) were individually remembered better than all other targets, whereas non-prototypical targets (no-headscarf and Arabic accent) were not remembered individually at all. These findings are discussed in terms of intersectionality and category prototypicality.