Abstract
ABSTRACTGrammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., Studentenmasc.‘students’) can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To investigate the interpretation of role-nouns, the present ERP study assessed grammatical gender processing in German. Twenty participants read sentences where a role-noun (masculine or feminine) introduced a group of people, followed by a congruent (masculine–men, feminine–women) or incongruent (masculine–women, feminine–men) continuation. Both for feminine-men and masculine-women continuations a P600 (500 to 800 ms) was observed; another positivity was already present from 300 to 500 ms for feminine-men continuations but critically not for masculine-women continuations. The results imply a male-biased rather than gender-neutral interpretation of the masculine—despite widespread usage of the masculine as a gender-neutral form—suggesting that masculine forms are inadequate for representing genders equally.
Highlights
Gender is a social category we encounter on a daily basis, with gender equality having become an important sociopolitical issue
The present study investigates how masculine grammatical gender affects the online processing of differently gendered human referents
Based on the previous literature, we reasoned that if readers encounter processing difficulties due to the interpretation of grammatical gender, this should result in changes in the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the N400 and P600 time windows and thereby shed light on the underlying processing mechanisms
Summary
Gender is a social category we encounter on a daily basis, with gender equality having become an important sociopolitical issue. Testing German speakers, Irmen et al (2010) investigated how stereotypicality of role-nouns affected the processing of a subsequent referent Their participants read sentences consisting of a stereotypically male or female role-noun (e.g., computer scientist; stereotypically male), and a coreferential continuation, which was either neutral (e.g., these people), matching (e.g., these men), or mismatching (e.g., these women) with regards to gender. A role-noun in the masculine favors a male-specific interpretation of the referent, masculine role-nouns followed by women continuations should lead to processing difficulties, resulting in similar ERP effects as those to men continuations after feminine role-nouns
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