Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N1 = 32, N2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.

Subtle Linguistic Cues Affecting Gender In(Equality)

“…Targets of higher prominence (such as a person or an animate target) are seen to more probably occupy the position of agent than of the recipient of an action. Importantly, eye-tracking studies have shown that masculine rather than feminine role nouns are expected to serve as thematic agents in a sentence (Esaulova et al, 2014(Esaulova et al, , 2017.…”

Does the Use of Gender-Fair Language Influence the Comprehensibility of Texts?

“…Studies conducted regarding natural gender languages as well as grammatical gender languages show that the use of masculine-only forms actually leads to a male bias in mental representation, irrespective of the methods used (for example, see Esaulova, Reali, & von Stockhausen, 2017; Gabriel, Gygax, Sarrasin, Garnham, & Oakhill, 2008; Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, & Garnham, 2008; Sato, Gabriel, & Gygax, 2016; Sato, Gygax, & Gabriel, 2016).…”

“…Studies conducted regarding natural gender languages as well as grammatical gender languages show that the use of masculine-only forms actually leads to a male bias in mental representation, irrespective of the methods used (for example, see Esaulova, Reali, & von Stockhausen, 2017;.…”

The Alignment of Agent-First Preferences with Visual Event Representations: Contrasting German and Arabic

“…Ferreira ( 2003 ), for instance, reported that participants made more mistakes when they were asked to identify agents and patients in passive sentences where the patient was realized as the subject compared to active sentences where the agent was the subject. Similarly, relative clauses that start with a patient (object-extracted relative clauses, such as Die Studenten, die die Fahrradfahrerin übersehen hat, sind verletzt ‘The students, whom the cyclist overlooked, are hurt’) are reported as more difficult for comprehension than those that start with an agent (subject-extracted relative clauses, such as Die Studenten, die die Fahrradfahrerin übersehen haben, sind verletzt ‘The students, who overlooked the cyclist, are hurt’) (e.g., Friederici et al 1998 ; Gordon et al 2001 ; Staub 2010 ; Esaulova et al 2017 ).…”