Three experiments investigated how grammatical gender and gender stereotypicality influence the way person information is mentally represented. Participants read sentences about social groups denoted by nouns with different grammatical gender and stereotypicality. A following sentence contained a reference to the social group that qualified the group members as female, male, or neither one. Experiment 1 tested grammatically masculine nouns; Experiment 2 tested gender-balanced forms, composed of the masculine and the feminine or neither one; and Experiment 3 tested nouns without gender inflection. Stereotypicality varied within studies. Second sentence reading times differed depending on the fit between grammatical gender and stereotypicality of the first sentence’s subject and the subsequent information’s gender-relatedness. Both grammatical gender and stereotypicality contribute biological gender information to mentally represented person information. Strong grammatical input may override stereotypicality’s influence. The feminine’s influence seems to be weaker than the masculine’s. Results are discussed in the framework of the scenario mapping and focus approach.
Braun, F., Gottburgsen, A., Sczesny, S., & Stahlberg, D. (1998). Können Geophysiker Frauen sein? Generische Personenbezeichnungen im Deutschen [Can geophysicists be women? Generic person denotations in German]. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 26, 265-283.
2.
Brewer, M. B., Dull, V.,& Lui, L. (1981). Perceptions of the elderly: Stereotypes as prototypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 656-670.
3.
Cacciari, C., Carreiras, M.,& Barbolini-Cionini, C. (1997). Whenwords have two genders: Anaphor resolution for Italian functionally ambiguous words. Journal of Memory & Language, 37, 517-532.
4.
Cameron, D. (1985). What has gender got to do with sex?Language& Communication, 5, 19-27.
5.
Carreiras, M., Garnham, A., Oakhill, J.,& Cain, K.(1996). The use of stereotypical gender information in constructing a mental model: Evidence from English and Spanish. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 639-663.
6.
Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
7.
Deaux, K.,& La France, M. (1998). Gender. In D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske,& G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology(4th ed., pp. 788-827). New York: McGraw-Hill.
8.
Diekman, A. B., & Eagly, A. H. (2000). Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present, and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1171-1188.
9.
Duden Band 4. (1984). Die Grammatik[Grammar]. Mannheim, Germany: Dudenverlag.
10.
Duden Band 4. (1995). Die Grammatik[Grammar]. Mannheim, Germany: Dudenverlag.
11.
Duden Band 4. (1998). Die Grammatik[Grammar]. Mannheim, Germany: Dudenverlag.
12.
Duffy, S. A., & Keir, J. A. (In press). Violating stereotypes: Eye movements and comprehension processes when text conflicts with world knowledge. Memory & Cognition.
13.
Eckes, T. (1997). Geschlechterstereotype[Gender stereotypes]. Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft.
14.
Fiske, S. T., Lin, M., & Neuberg, S. L. (1999). The Continuum Model: Ten years later. In S. Chaiken& Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology(pp. 231-255). New York: Guilford.
15.
Fiske, S. T.,& Neuberg, S. L. (1990). Acontinuum of impression formation, from categorybased to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 1-74.
16.
Frazier, L. (1995). Constraint satisfaction as a theory of sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 437-468.
17.
Garnham, A. (2001). Mental models and the interpretation of anaphora. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
18.
Garnham, A., Oakhill, J., Ehrlich, M.-F., & Carreiras, M. (1995). Representations and processes in the interpretation of pronouns: New evidence from Spanish and French. Journal of Memory & Language, 34, 41-62.
19.
Garrod, S.C. (1995). Distinguishing between explicit and implicit focus during text comprehension. In G. Rickheit & C. Habel (Eds.), Focus and coherence in discourse processing(pp. 3-17). Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.
20.
Heise, E. (2000). Sind Frauen mitgemeint? Eine empirische Untersuchung zum Verständnis des generischen Maskulinums und seiner Alternativen [Are women also meant? An empirical investigation on the understanding of masculine generics and their linguistic alternatives]. Sprache & Kognition, 19, 3-13.
21.
Hellinger, M. (1990). Kontrastive feministische Linguistik: Mechanismen sprachlicherDiskriminierung im Englischen und Deutschen[Contrastive feminist linguistics: Mechanisms of linguistic discrimination in English and German]. Ismaning, Germany: Max Hueber Verlag.
22.
Irmen, L. (2003, August). How do grammatical and stereotypical gender influence the representation of person information?Poster presented at the conference Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLa P), Glasgow, UK.
23.
Irmen, L., & Kaczmarek, N. (1999). Zur mentalen Repräsentation des generischen Maskulinums und zweier seiner Alternativen [Abstract] [On the mental representation of masculine generics and two alternative linguistic forms]. In E. Schröger, A. Mecklinger, & A. Widmann (Hrsg.), Experimentelle Psychologie. Beiträge zur 41. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen(S. 137). Lengerich, Germany: Pabst.
24.
Irmen, L., & Köhncke, A. (1996). Zur Psychologie des “generischen” Maskulinums [On the psychology of the generic masculine]. Sprache & Kognition, 15, 152-166.
25.
Pusch, L. F. (1984). Das Deutsche als Männersprache[German as men’s language]. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
26.
Rothermund, K. (1998). Automatische geschlechtsspezifische Assoziationen beim Lesen von Texten mit geschlechtseindeutigen und generisch maskulinen Text-Subjekten [Automatic sex-specific associations during reading of texts with gender specified and generic masculine text subjects]. Sprache & Kognition, 17, 183-198.
27.
Rothmund, J., & Scheele, B. (2004). Personenbezeichnungsmodelle auf dem Prüfstand [Putting person denotation models to the test]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 212, 40-54.
28.
Sanford, A. J., & Garrod, S. C. (1981). Understanding written language. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
29.
Sanford, A. J.,& Garrod, S. C. (1998). The role of scenario mapping in text comprehension. Discourse Processes, 26, 159-190.
30.
Scheele, B., & Gauler, E. (1993). Wählen Wissenschaftler ihre Probleme anders aus als Wissenschaftlerinnen? Das Genus-Sexus-Problem als paradigmatischer Fall der linguistischen Relativitätsthese [Do (male) scientists choose their problems differently from (female) scientists? The problem of the relation between grammatical gender and sex as a paradigm for linguistic relativity]. Sprache& Kognition, 12, 59-72.
31.
Silveira, J. (1980). Generic masculine words and thinking. Women’s Studies International Quarterly, 3, 165-178.
32.
Stahlberg, D., & Sczesny, S. (2001). Effekte des generischen Maskulinums und alternativer Sprachformen auf den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen [Effects of generic masculine and alternative forms on the inclusion of women in mental representations]. Psychologische Rundschau, 52, 131-140.
33.
Steiger, V. (2004). Zur Geschichte des Generischen Maskulinums im Deutschen[On the history of the generic masculine in German]. Unpublished diploma thesis, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
34.
Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory & Language, 48, 542-562.
35.
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J.,& Hanna, J. E. (2000). Modeling thematic and discourse context effects with a multiple constraint approach: Implications for the architecture of the language comprehension system. In M. W. Crocker, M. J. Pickering, & C. Clifton, Jr. (Eds.), Architectures and mechanisms of language processing(pp. 90-118). New York: Cambridge University Press.
36.
Tukey, J. W. (1977). Exploratory data analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
