Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes

Osterhout, Lee; Bersick, Michael; McLaughlin, Judith

doi:10.3758/bf03211283

Cited by 223 publications

(262 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…These results resemble those of Osterhout et al (1997; see also Osterhout and Mobley, 1995), who observed a P600 effect to reflexives in anomalous sentences like "The man prepared herself for the operation", as well as in more subtle genderstereotyped sentences such as "The doctor prepared herself for the operation". However, in contrast to a 'bound' reflexive pronoun such as "herself", which must find its antecedent within the same sentence, a 'free' pronoun such as "he" or "she" can in principle refer to an as yet unmentioned additional person.…”

supporting

confidence: 81%

“…For nouns and pronouns alike, and across spoken and written language, referential ambiguity elicits an Nref effect, a frontally dominant, sustained negative shift. A referentially failing pronoun like "he" with only women introduced, however, elicits a P600 effect (see also Osterhout and Mobley, 1995;Osterhout et al, 1997). The good news about this neuronal dissociation is that it tells us (a) that the brain handles these two referentially complex situations in a different way, recruiting partially non-overlapping neuronal ensembles, and (b) that we can use ERPs to selectively keep track of each.…”

Section: Summary and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, if, as proposed in the Immediate Focusing account, verb-based implicit causality immediately foregrounds a particular referent, a bias-inconsistent pronoun should present a problem, in that its grammaticized gender does not match the foregrounded, most salient referent. In the light of the findings reviewed in Section 2.2 (Nieuwland and Van Berkum, submitted for publication; Van Berkum et al, 2004; see also Osterhout and Mobley, 1995;Osterhout et al, 1997), we expected that such bias-inconsistent pronouns would momentarily be perceived as having the wrong syntactic gender, and would as such elicit a P600 effect.…”

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confidence: 93%

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Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Berkum¹,

Koornneef²,

Otten³

et al. 2007

Brain Research

196

214

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The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough-readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like "David praised Linda because…" can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent "he" is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference. IntroductionWords reliably mean things. In fact, something about word meaning is invariant enough to be listed in a dictionary. Here, for example, is what the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary lists for the word "girl":girl (noun): 1. a female child or young woman, especially one still at school: "Two girls showed us round the classrooms."Of course, we all know that when a word is placed in the context of other words, shades of meaning can emerge. For "girl", some of the most familiar ones are listed in the dictionary too: girl (noun): ……… 2. a daughter: "We have two girls.", "My little girl is five." 3. [usually plural] a woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group: "shop/office girls" 4. [always plural] one of a group of female friends: "I'm going out with the girls tonight.", "The girls at work gave it to me"

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supporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Summary and Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 93%

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Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Berkum¹,

Koornneef²,

Otten³

et al. 2007

Brain Research

196

214

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“…The P600 is to date assumed to reflect processes of repair or reanalysis, particularly during grammatical violations [4,5,7,8]. It has therefore been suggested that the P600 effect observed in response to stereotype violations may reflect similar processes involving re-integration of semantic meaning and stereotypical beliefs [12]. Note, however, that the P600 effect has only been demonstrated for reflexive pronouns, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…The driver of the wrecked car pulled herself through the window) does not lead to an N400 effect but to a late positive deflection (P600) of the ERP [12]. The P600 is to date assumed to reflect processes of repair or reanalysis, particularly during grammatical violations [4,5,7,8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Talker's voice and gender stereotype in human auditory sentence processing – evidence from event-related brain potentials

Lattner

Friederici

2003

Neuroscience Letters

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The present study investigated the influence of implicit speaker information on the sentence interpretation. We auditorily presented sentences that comprised of either stereotypically male or stereotypically female self-referent utterances. In the congruent conditions, these utterances were produced by speakers whose gender matched the semantic content. In the incongruent condition, stereotypically male utterances were produced by female speakers and vice versa. The event-related brain potentials (ERP) of 32 listeners exhibited a late positivity (P600) for the incongruent condition. No significant differences were observed between male and female listeners. In the absence of any ERP effect in the earlier time range, it was concluded that the access of the semantic information as such is independent of the speaker's voice, but that speaker property, semantic content and stereotypical knowledge are integrated in a later processing stage. In speech communication the listener, not only decodes the speaker's intended linguistic message from the acoustic signal, but at the same time he/she extracts information about age, gender and other properties of the speaker. In the discourse situation, this implicit information serves as part of the context knowledge. The aim of the present experiment was to investigate how this information influences the interpretation of an utterance.Previous studies registrating event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while subjects were presented with sentences, have shown that a violation of explicit context knowledge about a person leads to a distinct brain response. In one study [3], subjects had learned facts about fictious people (e.g. Mary is a lawyer). In the test session they were presented with facts confirming or contradicting these learned facts. A contradicting target utterance (e.g. Mary is a chemist) led to a negative ERP called N400 which is event-locked to the presentation of the contradicting word. Similar effects have been reported in relation to the preceding discourse information (e.g. 'Jane told her brother that he was exceptionally slow', presented in a context where he was described as being very fast) [14]. As the N400 is typically interpreted as reflecting difficulties in semantic/pragmatic integration [1,6,9 -11,15] it was concluded from the latter result that rapid word integration is influenced by a broad range of context factors including explicit knowledge as well as the discourse information.However, another study demonstrated that a target word violating stereotypical assumptions (e.g. The driver of the wrecked car pulled herself through the window) does not lead to an N400 effect but to a late positive deflection (P600) of the ERP [12]. The P600 is to date assumed to reflect processes of repair or reanalysis, particularly during grammatical violations [4,5,7,8]. It has therefore been suggested that the P600 effect observed in response to stereotype violations may reflect similar processes involving re-integration of semantic meaning and stereotypical be...

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Spatiotemporal mapping of sex differences during attentional processing

Neuhaus¹,

Opgen‐Rhein²,

Urbanek³

et al. 2009

Human Brain Mapping

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Functional neuroimaging studies have increasingly aimed at approximating neural substrates of human cognitive sex differences elicited by visuospatial challenge. It has been suggested that females and males use different behaviorally relevant neurocognitive strategies. In females, greater right prefrontal cortex activation has been found in several studies. The spatiotemporal dynamics of neural events associated with these sex differences is still unclear. We studied 22 female and 22 male participants matched for age, education, and nicotine with 29-channel-electroencephalogram recorded under a visual selective attention paradigm, the Attention Network Test. Visual event-related potentials (ERP) were topographically analyzed and neuroelectric sources were estimated. In absence of behavioral differences, ERP analysis revealed a novel frontal-occipital second peak of visual N100 that was significantly increased in females relative to males. Further, in females exclusively, a corresponding central ERP component at around 220 ms was found; here, a strong correlation between stimulus salience and sex difference of the central ERP component amplitude was observed. Subsequent source analysis revealed increased cortical current densities in right rostral prefrontal (BA 10) and occipital cortex (BA 19) in female subjects. This is the first study to report on a tripartite association between sex differences in ERPs, visual stimulus salience, and right prefrontal cortex activation during attentional processing.

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Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes

Cited by 223 publications

References 46 publications

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

Talker's voice and gender stereotype in human auditory sentence processing – evidence from event-related brain potentials

Spatiotemporal mapping of sex differences during attentional processing

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