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Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 3, 195-229 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X02021003001

Linguistic Context and Social Perception

Does Stimulus Abstraction Moderate Processing Style?

Laura ter Doest

Free University Amsterdam, sweeney{at}fsw.LeidenUniv.nl

Gün R. Semin

Free University Amsterdam, gr.semin{at}psy.vu.nl

Steven J. Sherman

Indiana University

This article considers the role of linguistic context in social memory and social judgment. Two experiments compared perceivers’ responses to person descriptions formulated at a high level of linguistic abstraction (adjectives/traits) versus a low level of linguistic abstraction (action verbs/behaviors). Based on the linguistic category model, together with prior empirical findings in psychology and linguistics, traits as compared with behavioral descriptions of a social target were hypothesized to elicit lower attention, poorer recall, and more expectancy-consistent impressions. Support for these hypotheses was obtained for a social target consisting of an individual as well as a nonentitative group. These results suggest a moderating role of linguistic context in inconsistency processing. Whereas concrete (behavioral) person descriptions elicited relatively deep, systematic processing, abstract (trait) person descriptions elicited more cursory, heuristic processing guided by the perceiver’s expectancies regarding the target person. It is concluded that the methodological and substantive implications of linguistic context deserve greater attention in social psychological research.


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