TY - JOUR

T1 - Gauging the impact of gender grammaticization in different languages

T2 - application of a linguistic-visual paradigm

AU - Sato, Sayaka

AU - Gygax, Pascal M.

AU - Gabriel, Ute

N1 - Copyright © 2016 Sato, Gygax and Gabriel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

PY - 2016/2/23

Y1 - 2016/2/23

N2 - Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determiners (French: les [generic] vs. German: die [morphologically feminine]). Bilingual speakers of French and German had to judge whether a pair of facial images representing two men or a man and a woman could represent a gender stereotypical role noun prime (e.g., nurses). The prime was presented in the masculine plural form with or without a plural determiner. Results indicated that the overt grammaticization of the male gender in the masculine form dominated the representation of the role nouns (though interpretable as generic). However, the effect of the determiner was not found, indicating that only gender information associated to a human reference role noun had impacted readers’ representations. The results, discussed in the framework of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, demonstrated that linguistic-visual paradigms are well-suited to gauge the impact of both stereotype information and grammaticization when processing role nouns.

AB - Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determiners (French: les [generic] vs. German: die [morphologically feminine]). Bilingual speakers of French and German had to judge whether a pair of facial images representing two men or a man and a woman could represent a gender stereotypical role noun prime (e.g., nurses). The prime was presented in the masculine plural form with or without a plural determiner. Results indicated that the overt grammaticization of the male gender in the masculine form dominated the representation of the role nouns (though interpretable as generic). However, the effect of the determiner was not found, indicating that only gender information associated to a human reference role noun had impacted readers’ representations. The results, discussed in the framework of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, demonstrated that linguistic-visual paradigms are well-suited to gauge the impact of both stereotype information and grammaticization when processing role nouns.

KW - gender

KW - representation

KW - gender stereotypes

KW - gramatical gender

KW - generic masculine

KW - thinking-for-speaking hypothesis

KW - bilingualism

U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00140

DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00140

M3 - Journal article

JO - Frontiers in Psychology

JF - Frontiers in Psychology

SN - 1664-1078

IS - 140

M1 - 7

ER -