Cross-linguistic evidence for gender as a prominence feature.

Yulia Esaulova,Lisa Von Stockhausen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01356

Abstract

This paper discusses recent findings in the online sentence processing research that suggest to consider gender information a prominence feature. Prominence features are hierarchically ordered information types that interact with formal features of arguments (e.g., grammatical functions, thematic roles) and thus determine the readers’ ability to efficiently interpret linguistic ambiguities. While previous research addressed a number of prominence features (e.g., animacy, definiteness, person), there is now first empirical evidence indicating that gender information also influences the assignment of thematic roles across languages. Grammatically masculine role nouns are processed faster as agents than patients compared to feminine ones. Stereotypically male role nouns (e.g., electrician) are integrated with an agent role easier than neutral ones (e.g., musician), which in turn are integrated easier than female ones (e.g., beautician). Conceptualizing gender as a prominence feature will not only expand our knowledge about information types relevant for online comprehension but also uncover subtle gender biases present in language. The present work explores the possibility for a theoretical integration of social psychological and psycholinguistic research focusing on gender with research on prominence. Potential advantages an interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender as a prominence feature, open questions and future directions are discussed.

Highlights

Natural languages often present their users with ambiguities that require an interpretation even in cases when the provided information does not suffice to resolve them
The findings demonstrate a relative difficulty in the processing of masculine compared to feminine referents in both experiments, which indicates that readers do create specific expectations about the gender of the referent role noun relying on its grammatical function of an object in the sentence
In a different language, the processing of sentences with backward anaphors was easier when low-ranked object referents were grammatically feminine rather than masculine (Esaulova, 2015). Both of these findings suggest the hierarchical organization of grammatical gender information, where masculine gender outranks feminine gender on the prominence hierarchy

Summary

Introduction

Natural languages often present their users with ambiguities that require an interpretation even in cases when the provided information does not suffice to resolve them. One strategy would involve computational mechanisms that defer hypotheses about the possible meaning of a sentence until enough information is provided to resolve ambiguities. Another strategy would involve processing the sentence incrementally, on a word-by-word basis, as the linguistic input unfolds. As a result of this interaction, in the process of incremental interpretation thematic structure and grammatical functions of verbal arguments can be predicted from the position of their prominence features on a scale, where higher. We propose to conceptualize gender information as another prominence feature, i.e., the information type that systematically affects readers’ predictions about thematic roles and grammatical functions of arguments. We both suggest a theoretical foundation and evaluate the existing empirical evidence for different types of gender information to function as a prominence feature with the aim to demonstrate that gender influences go beyond the well-known agreement and mismatch effects

Prominence and Sentence Structure

Overview of Studies on Gender as a Prominence Feature

Gender Prominence as a Bias

Conclusion