Grammatical Gender in German Influences How Role-Nouns Are Interpreted: Evidence from ERPs

Abstract

Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., Studentenmasc.'students') can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To investigate the interpretation of role-nouns, the present ERP study assessed grammatical gender processing in German. Twenty participants read sentences where a role-noun (masculine or feminine) introduced a group of people, followed by a congruent (masculine-men, feminine-women) or incongruent (masculine-women, feminine-men) continuation. Both for feminine-men and masculine-women continuations a P600 (500 to 800 ms) was observed; another positivity was already present from 300 to 500 ms for feminine-men continuations but critically not for masculine-women continuations. The results imply a malebiased rather than gender-neutral interpretation of the masculine-despite widespread usage of the masculine as a gender-neutral form-suggesting that masculine forms are inadequate for representing genders equally.

Implicit consequentiality bias in English: A corpus of 300+ verbs

“…More recently, norms have become easier to collect and score, and a number of factors have driven the need for norms on larger sets of items, in particular the use of techniques such as EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that require large sets of items if effects are to stand out from a background of noise, and the replication crisis, which suggests the use of larger sets of items (and participants) in all studies. For example, an event-related potential (ERP) study by Misersky, Majid, and Snijders (2019) used the large set of 400+ gender stereotype norms collected by Misersky et al (2014), which have also been used in a range of other studies (e.g., Lewis & Lupyan, 2020;Richy & Burnett, 2020;Mueller-Feldmeth, Ahnefeld, & Hanulikova, 2019;Gygax et al, 2019). Studies of the effect of emotional valence on word recognition times (Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2012) and on ERP components during word recognition (Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2013) used the Sussex Affective Word List (SAWL) with ratings on 525 words, and a more recent study by Chen et al (2015) used the alterative ANEW corpus (Affective Norms for English Words, Bradley & Lang, 1999), which has an even larger set of ratings, in this case for American English.…”

The male bias of a generically-intended masculine pronoun: Evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation

“…A question which has occupied linguists for decades is whether such generically-intended masculine word forms trigger a gender inference and make language users think of the referents as male despite their generic intention. Such a male bias has been consistently found for grammatically gender-marked role nouns in languages such as German, French and Norwegian [2][3][4][5].…”

“…As described in the Introduction, masculine generic role nouns have consistently been found to cause a male bias in languages such as French and German. This was shown with methods as varied as EEG [5], eye-tracking [3], self-paced reading [6], sentence evaluation [2,16] and also with Moulton et al's [7] story writing method [40]. As also described by Redl et al, it is possible that role nouns simply cause a larger male bias than the masculine possessive pronoun zijn 'his'.…”

“…This has been shown using various methods such as sentence evaluation [2], self-paced reading [6], eye-tracking [3] and EEG [5]. All these studies made use of a variation of the following design: A group of people is introduced by means of a role noun in the masculine generic form, and then (a subpart of) the group is revealed to be male or female (e.g., Die Studenten gingen zur Mensa, weil manche der Frauen/Männer Hunger hatten.…”

Gender is a multifaceted concept: evidence that specific life experiences differentially shape the concept of gender

“…For instance, traits such as assertiveness, competence, warmth, and nurturance are valued differently in relation to men and women; overall, women are more frequently associated with family life, whereas men are associated with career advancement (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Importantly, implicit stereotypical gendered knowledge is activated during language processing: comprehension of linguistic information consistent with stereotypical gender-expectations (e.g., feminine pronouns with the role descriptors "nurse") is more fluent than when it is inconsistent (e.g., masculine pronouns with "nurse"; see e.g., Miersky, Majid & Snijders, 2019;Pesciarelli, Scorolli & Cacciari, 2019).…”