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Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 4, 414-433 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0261927X03258192

Automatic Evaluation of Novel Words

The Role of Superficial Phonetics

Magda Teresa Garcia

Montclair State University

John A. Bargh

Yale University

The automatic evaluation effect is the tendency for people to immediately and unintentionally classify environmental stimuli as either "good" or "bad." Does this effect extend even to one’s first encounter of novel voice stimuli? Novel nonsense words were generated and then served as priming stimuli together with a group of common English words. Each prime stimulus was presented immediately before a visual lexical target stimulus. Latency of response to the target was always the dependent variable. Experiment 1 indicated that nonsense stimuli are immediately evaluated and classified on the basis of their superficial phonetic qualities. Experiment 2 indicated that these superficial qualities did not influence the automatic evaluative response to familiar words, which was based instead on the words’ semantic meaning. These results imply that there is a preconscious first impression for the sounds of unfamiliar languages and that this is a potentially biasing influence on subsequent judgments and social interactions.

Key Words: automatic • evaluation • phonetics • impression formation


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