Responding to Lexical Stimuli With Gender Associations

Abstract

This article presents a cognitive–cultural model (CC model) of situational, dispositional, and motivational factors affecting gender-associational responses to lexical expressions concerning people. It is argued that the mind is trained to perceive gender as an indispensable human feature. When decoding the meaning of a message, it will search for cues of gender, usually prioritizing the semantic content. When gender is not clearly specified, the mind attempts to plausibly reconstruct missing data by referring to indirect extrasemantic cues. This often occurs beyond conscious recognition. Lexical cues are strongly influential owing to their direct association with semantic gender-specific meaning. Gender-associational dispositions resulting from cognitive training also affect the response. This article discusses cognitive training’s cultural, gender-related, and individual components, along with dispositional and incidental factors, affecting motivation to consciously authorize and/or alter the initial automatic response.