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

Abstract

Two experiments tested whether the Dutch possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ gives rise to a gender inference and thus causes a male bias when used generically in sentences such as Everyone was putting on his shoes. Experiment 1 (N = 120, 48 male) was a conceptual replication of a previous eye-tracking study that had not found evidence of a male bias. The results of the current eye-tracking experiment showed the generically-intended masculine pronoun to trigger a gender inference and cause a male bias, but for male participants and in stereotypically neutral stereotype contexts only. No evidence for a male bias was thus found in stereotypically female and male context nor for female participants altogether. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 40 male) used the same stimuli as Experiment 1, but employed the sentence evaluation paradigm. No evidence of a male bias was found in Experiment 2. Taken together, the results suggest that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn ‘his’ can cause a male bias for male participants even when the referents are previously introduced by inclusive and grammatically gender-unmarked iedereen ‘everyone’. This male bias surfaces with eye-tracking, which taps directly into early language processing, but not in offline sentence evaluations. Furthermore, the results suggest that the intended generic reading of the masculine possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ is more readily available for women than for men.

Deconstructing the Native Speaker: Further Evidence From Heritage Speakers for Why This Horse Should Be Dead!

“…The category “native speaker” has been used to characterize a particular speaker population for many years (see Hopp, 2016 ; Azar et al, 2019 ; Ionin et al, 2021 ; Redl et al, 2021 as recent cases in point). What most researchers seem to agree on is that a native speaker is defined as a speaker who acquires their language naturalistically in early childhood ( Cook, 1999 ; Davies, 2004 , 2013 ).…”

Masculine generic pronouns as a gender cue in generic statements

“…The sentence in (3) refers to a certain event in the past, hence it is episodic. Redl et al (2021) found male participants to show signs of a male bias (i.e., an increase in reading time when reference was made to women) in these episodic contexts. They concluded that the genericallyintended pronoun zijn 'his' can lead to a male bias as well.…”

“…Thus, when a masculine generic role noun (e.g., German Studenten 'students (MASC)' in (1))though intended to refer to persons of all genders is used in episodic statements that denote specific events containing certain (groups of) individuals, readers often use the grammatical gender to infer the referents' supposed gender (e.g., for French and German see Garnham et al, 2012;Misersky et al, 2019). Redl, Frank, De Swart, and De Hoop (2021) found similar results for the processing of the Dutch masculine generic pronoun zijn 'his' in episodic contexts such as (3). They conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which they presented participants with sentences such as the following:…”

“…, who tested episodic contexts, voiced similar criticism of Irmen's study. The authors ensured that the women or men mentioned in the second sentence were understood as a subgroup of the group introduced in the first sentence, as did other researchers after them (e.g., Misersky et al, 2019 who used stimuli similar to Gygax et al, 2018;Redl et al, 2021). Furthermore, it is unclear if these findings on role nouns generalize to pronouns.…”

How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

“…More eye-tracking studies have been conducted investigating the influence in processing cost for both gender-neutral pronouns and the generic male pronoun. Irmen (2007) and Redl et al (2021) find male biases when using generic male pronouns in Dutch and generic role nouns in German. The authors of Sanford and Filik (2007) found a clear processing cost when using singular they in English, however their stimuli did not include any investigation of how (anti-)stereotypes influence this processing cost and is thus only in parts comparable to other studies.…”