Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States ( N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom ( N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants’ beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.

Previous research on VP-ellipsis has revealed the existence of a Mismatch Asymmetry, whereby cases with passive voice ellipsis clauses and active antecedent clauses are less acceptable than cases with active ellipsis clauses and passive antecedents. According to the memory-based explanation offered by the Recycling Hypothesis (RH; Arregui et al. 2006), this effect arises because passive clauses are more prone to be misremembered as active than the other way around, and hence passive-active mismatches are more likely to create an "illusion of grammaticality". This paper describes three experiments that explore the source of the asymmetry, with particular attention to the predictions of the RH account on previously unexamined cases. The findings are inconsistent with the predictions of memory-based explanations such as the RH, and instead point to the existence of a penalty against passive ellipsis clauses in subject focus environments, one that applies to both matched and mismatched cases of VP-ellipsis and in both anaphoric and cataphoric discourse configurations. A possible explanation for the penalty is offered as a subject for future work.

Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 US (N=24,863) and 2017 UK (N=2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants’ beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the US, even when the female candidate was expected to win, ’she’ references were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the UK, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, ’she’ was preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is as a source of implicit biases next to previously known biases such as those measured by the implicit association test.

This paper reports the results of two acceptability judgment experiments that examine the effect of PP remnants with mismatching correlates in the antecedent clause (either a PP, with a distinct preposition, or an NP) on the acceptability of pseudogapping as well as non-elliptical controls. Across both experiments, three novel findings emerge: First, utterances with mismatching PPs across the ellipsis clause and its antecedent were consistently degraded relative to their preposition-matched counterparts. Second, this mismatch penalty arose for elliptical and non-elliptical variants alike with only minor differences between the two. Finally, a significant portion of the mismatch penalties was explained away by the degree of semantic similarity between the thematic relations established by the mismatching prepositions with respect to the antecedent verb which was measured in a separate norming experiment. We examine the consequences of these new empirical results for current theories of pseudogapping, namely (i) the remnant-raising analysis, according to which the remnant XP is raised leftward out of the VP prior to VP ellipsis, licensed under identity with its antecedent; and (ii) the direct generation analysis, under which auxiliaries are verbal proforms that recover their referent anaphorically without the need for remnant movement or syntactic identity between the verb and its antecedent. We conclude that the data are more naturally accounted for under the direct generation approach.

To test whether word-level information facilitates the learning of phonetic categories, 40 adult native English speakers were exposed to a bimodal distribution of vowels embedded in non-words. Half of the subjects received phonetic categories aligned with lexical categories, while the other half received no such cue. It was hypothesized that the subjects exposed to lexically-informative training stimuli that were aligned with the target categories would outperform the control subjects on a perceptual categorization task after training. While the results revealed no such group differences, the data indicated that many subjects used the relevant dimension for categorization before having received any training. Implications regarding experimental design and suggestions for future research based on the results are discussed.