What's in a (role) name? Formal and conceptual aspects of comprehending personal nouns.
Two eye-tracking studies assessed effects of grammatical and conceptual gender cues in generic role name processing in German. Participants read passages about a social or occupational group introduced by way of a generic role name (e.g., Soldaten/soldiers, Künstler/artists). Later in the passage the gender of this group was specified by the anaphoric expression diese Männer/these men or diese Frauen/these women. Testing masculine generic role names of male, female or neutral conceptual gender (Exp. 1) showed that a gender mismatch between the role name's conceptual gender and the anaphor significantly slowed reading immediately before and after the anaphoric noun. A mismatch between the antecedent's grammatical gender and the anaphor slowed down the reading of the anaphoric noun itself. Testing grammatically gender-unmarked role names (Exp. 2) revealed a general male bias in participants' understanding, irrespective of grammatical or conceptual gender. The experiments extend previous findings on gender effects to non-referential role names and generic contexts. Theoretical aspects of gender and plural reference as well as gender information in mental models are discussed.
Irmen
Lisa
L
Department of Psychology, University of Heidelberg, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. lisa.irmen@psychologie.uni-heidelberg.de
D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D012737:Sex Factors