The masculine form and its competing interpretations in French: When linking grammatically masculine role names to female referents is difficult

Abstract

Using a word association paradigm we examined the extent to which readers can overcome the specific interpretation of the grammatical masculine form in French when instructed to embrace its generic meaning. In two experiments participants were to decide whether a person introduced by a kinship term (e.g. aunt) could be part of a group represented by a role name (e.g. musicians). After the completion of the first half of the experiment, participants were explicitly reminded about the generic interpretation and use of the masculine form. Although the reminder resulted in some level of generic interpretation, there were still strong traces of the specific interpretation in the response times, regardless of participants' inhibition capacities (Experiment 1). Adding a supplementary constraint by exposing readers to distractor role names in feminine forms (Experiment 2) did not reveal any different effects.The results indicated that although readers can be motivated to elaboratively activate the generic interpretation of the masculine form, the latter can not completely overrule a more passively activated specific one. <164 words>

Fostering the generic interpretation of grammatically masculine forms: When my aunt could be one of the mechanics

“…In this experiment, we were particularly interested in the interaction effects of Part (I, II & III) x Kinship, to address the impact of female kinship frequency on the habitual male bias effectas instantiated by a main effect of Kinship -found in and partly in Gygax et al (2012). As Part IV was primarily present to address the opposing effects of high female kinship frequency vs. the presence of feminine form (two opposing implicit sources of information), analyses were run separately for Parts I, II and III (implicit learning), and Parts III and IV (strength of the learning process).…”

“…We then compared this model to one including Part (our prime interest), and finally one including Stereotype (as in Gygax et al, 2012). Models were tested using the lmer() function of the lmer4 package of R, and model comparisons were assessed using the anova() function, which calculate the Chi-square value of the log-likelihood in order to evaluate the difference between models, following Baayen's (2008) …”

“…The idea behind this manipulation is that a higher frequency of occurrences of female characters associated to different role nouns might trigger an increased activation of female representations, hence countering the passive activation of a masculine-specific interpretation. Put differently, on the basis that explicit instructions seem inadequate to tackle the spontaneous activation of the specific interpretation of the masculine form (as in Gygax et al, 2012), implicit exposure to a higher frequency of occurrences of female characters associated with different role nouns may push the activation of the generic interpretation, maybe even to the extent of supplanting the specific interpretation of the masculine form. If the processes that were identified by Gygax et al (2012) are truly passive, a frequency manipulation (i.e., making people effortlessly select the generic interpretation) should work better than an explicit manipulation (i.e., making people monitor their selection).…”

“…Using the same paradigm, Gygax et al (2012) explored whether explicitly reminding participants that the masculine form could be used generically would reverse their tendency to lean towards a specific interpretation. Although they did find the reminder led to an increase of positive responses to female kinship -role noun in the masculine form pairs, participants continued to take longer to positively respond to those pairs compared to male kinship -role noun in the masculine form pairs.…”

“…Using the same paradigm as in and Gygax et al (2012), we try to target the passive processes behind the activation of the specific interpretation of the masculine form by manipulating the frequency of occurrence (i.e., an implicit manipulation) of the different pair-conditions (i.e., female kinship-role nouns and male kinship-role nouns). The idea behind this manipulation is that a higher frequency of occurrences of female characters associated to different role nouns might trigger an increased activation of female representations, hence countering the passive activation of a masculine-specific interpretation.…”