The processing of the Dutch masculine generic zijn ‘his’ across stereotype contexts: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

Language users often infer a person’s gender when it is not explicitly mentioned. This information is included in the mental model of the described situation, giving rise to expectations regarding the continuation of the discourse. Such gender inferences can be based on two types of information: gender stereotypes (e.g., nurses are female) and masculine generics, which are grammatically masculine word forms that are used to refer to all genders in certain contexts (e.g., To each his own). In this eye-tracking experiment (N = 82), which is the first to systematically investigate the online processing of masculine generic pronouns, we tested whether the frequently used Dutch masculine generic zijn ‘his’ leads to a male bias. In addition, we tested the effect of context by introducing male, female, and neutral stereotypes. We found no evidence for the hypothesis that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn ‘his’ results in a male bias. However, we found an effect of stereotype context. After introducing a female stereotype, reading about a man led to an increase in processing time. However, the reverse did not hold, which parallels the finding in social psychology that men are penalized more for gender-nonconforming behavior. This suggests that language processing is not only affected by the strength of stereotype contexts; the associated disapproval of violating these gender stereotypes affects language processing, too.

The male bias of a generically-intended personal pronoun in language processing

“…The authors hypothesized that reading times on female proper names would increase, as participants were expected to have previously made a male gender inference based on the pronoun zijn 'his', which would then mismatch the individual's actual gender. However, Redl et al (2018) found no such evidence of a male bias induced by the pronoun. Redl, Frank, De Swart and De Hoop (2020) then conceptually replicated this eye-tracking experiment and did find zijn 'his' to cause a male bias, however, only for male participants and in stereotypically neutral contexts.…”

“…Several experiments have tested whether the possessive pronoun zijn 'his' leads to a male bias when used generically, with mixed results. (Redl et al 2018;Redl, Szuba, et al 2020). What has become clear from our experiment is that the Dutch personal pronoun hij 'he' leads to a male bias in online processing for both male and female participants, despite hij 'he' being frequently used as a generic.…”

“…One such language is Dutch. In an attempt to better understand the effects of masculine generic pronouns on online processing, multiple experiments have previously investigated the possessive pronoun zijn 'his '. Redl, Eerland and Sanders (2018) conducted an eye-tracking experiment in which participants read sentences such as Iedereen was zijn tanden aan het poetsen 'Everyone was brushing his teeth'.…”

“…That is to say, the noun cousin, which can refer to either a male or female, would lead to the same amount of gender errors as sister when the context made it clear (by a picture of the cousin wearing a skirt) that cousin referred to a female individual. In the studies on the possessive pronoun zijn 'his' in Dutch (Redl et al 2018;Redl, Szuba, et al 2020), the head noun never referred to a person, hence there was never a gender mismatch within the noun phrase. Still, the fact that this type of mismatch (as in zijn zus 'his sister') is ubiquitous in everyday speech indicates that a masculine possessive pronoun, and as a consequence also its male referent, is less salient than (the male referent of) a masculine personal pronoun.…”

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

“…However, in other languages such as Dutch, masculine generic pronouns are still very commonly used and little is known about how they are processed. In an effort to answer whether masculine generic pronouns lead to an online and immediate male bias in processing in Dutch, Redl, Eerland, and Sanders [15] conducted an eye-tracking experiment. They constructed sentences featuring the possessive pronoun zijn 'his' in genericallyintended contexts similar to the studies on role nouns, and measured reading times on a male or female proper noun later on, for example:…”