Ladies First: Gender Stereotypes Drive Anticipatory Eye-Movements During Incremental Sentence Interpretation.

Ernesto Guerra,Héctor Carvacho,Jasmin Bernotat,Gerd Bohner

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.589429

Abstract

Immediate contextual information and world knowledge allow comprehenders to anticipate incoming language in real time. The cognitive mechanisms that underlie such behavior are, however, still only partially understood. We examined the novel idea that gender attitudes may influence how people make predictions during sentence processing. To this end, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment where participants listened to passive-voice sentences expressing gender-stereotypical actions (e.g., “The wood is being painted by the florist”) while observing displays containing both female and male characters representing gender-stereotypical professions (e.g., florists, soldiers). In addition, we assessed participants’ explicit gender-related attitudes to explore whether they might predict potential effects of gender-stereotypical information on anticipatory eye movements. The observed gaze pattern reflected that participants used gendered information to predict who was agent of the action. These effects were larger for female- vs. male-stereotypical contextual information but were not related to participants’ gender-related attitudes. Our results showed that predictive language processing can be moderated by gender stereotypes, and that anticipation is stronger for female (vs. male) depicted characters. Further research should test the direct relation between gender-stereotypical sentence processing and implicit gender attitudes. These findings contribute to both social psychology and psycholinguistics research, as they extend our understanding of stereotype processing in multimodal contexts and regarding the role of attitudes (on top of world knowledge) in language prediction.

Highlights

Humans frequently generate expectations about what will happen in the near future or even in the immediate subsequent moment
Contrary to our expectations, we observed no main effects of the attitude measures on anticipatory eye movements on any of the clusters, no differences between clusters, and no interaction effects
No previous experiments had investigated whether gender stereotypes are relevant for predictive language processing as reflected in anticipatory eye movements

Summary

Introduction

Humans frequently generate expectations about what will happen in the near future (e.g., thinking of tonight’s dinner) or even in the immediate subsequent moment. Anticipatory processing (or prediction) in language and cognition has received special attention in recent years, partly as a consequence of extensive experimental evidence showing that. Gender Stereotypes Drive Anticipatory Eye-Movements listeners and readers can make online language predictions (see DeLong et al, 2014; Huettig, 2015 for reviews), and triggered by a heated debate around mounting inconsistent evidence on the pervasiveness of this phenomenon (DeLong et al, 2017; Nieuwland et al, 2018; Huettig and Guerra, 2019; Nicenboim et al, 2020). Experimental studies on language-mediated visual attention have shown that during spoken sentence comprehension, prediction can be triggered by unfolding linguistic cues and knowledge about the world, allowing comprehenders to anticipate to-be-mentioned visual referents in real time (see Knoeferle and Crocker, 2007; Borovsky et al, 2012). People might attribute certain characteristics as intrinsic to a particular gender, e.g., women have lower mathematics abilities than men (Spencer et al, 1999; Dovidio et al, 2005; Jost and Kay, 2005)

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Conclusion