A New Look at Gender Inequality in Chinese: A Study of Chinese Speakers’ Perception of Gender-Based Characters

Cherng, Rong-Ju; Chang, Chu Lin; Chen, Jenn Yeu

doi:10.1007/s11199-009-9639-z

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Reflexive pronoun resolution in written Chinese needs to rely on the semantic information unequally encoded in the orthographic forms of the characters, given that one orthographic form codes for a generic gender while the other codes specifically for a feminine representation. The generic gender encoded by the default pronoun / he is confirmed here to be a gender-neutral pronoun (appropriate to both genders) in line with the rating study that words with the radical /rén/ human are rated as neutral (Cherng et al, 2009 ). Thus, mechanisms of co-reference of gender information between antecedents and reflexive pronouns in this study are modulated by the information carried by the semantic radicals denoting the different gender specificities of the pronouns.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…Increasing evidence has shown that Chinese speakers rely very much on sub-lexical units -semantic radicals and phonological components- during text comprehension (Perfetti and Zhang, 1991 ; Feldman and Siok, 1999 ; Ho et al, 2003 ; Liu et al, 2003 ; Ding et al, 2004 ; Lee et al, 2007 ; Hsu et al, 2009 ; Tsang and Chen, 2009 ). A study carried out by Cherng et al ( 2009 ), which explored whether Chinese script reflects negative attitudes toward women (whether characters containing the semantic radical for “woman” have a more negative valence), found no evidence of this in Chinese speakers' perception of gender-based characters. They reported no negative attitudes toward characters containing the semantic radical for “woman” (the meaning conveyed by the characters was rated by participants as positive, negative or neutral).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

Molinaro

Dowens

et al. 2016

Front. Psychol.

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The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for “he” (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for “she” (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive “/self” (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 “attention related” congruity effect for /himself and a P600 “integration difficulty” congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

Molinaro

Dowens

et al. 2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…For example, in Chinese, characters are often comprised of a collection of radicals (which themselves can be stand alone characters). Research suggests that terms comprising a radical that as a standalone character represents the word "son" are generally viewed more positively than terms comprising the character for "woman" (Cherng et al 2009), despite the fact that both sets of terms were generally judged to be positive. Thus, grammatical gender is only one facet of how language becomes gendered which may have wider social implications.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gendering of Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Natural Gender, and Genderless Languages

2011

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Feminists have long argued that sexist language can have real world consequences for gender relations and the relative status of men and women, and recent research suggests that grammatical gender can shape how people interpret the world around them along gender lines (Boroditsky 2009). Although others have theorized about the connection between grammatical gender in language and societal gender equality (Stahlberg et al. 2007), the current work tests this link empirically by examining differences in gender equality between countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless language systems. Of the 111 countries investigated, our findings suggest that countries where gendered languages are spoken evidence less gender equality compared to countries with other grammatical gender systems. Furthermore, countries where natural gender languages are spoken demonstrate greater gender equality, which may be due to the ease of creating gender symmetric revisions to instances of sexist language.

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A New Look at Gender Inequality in Chinese: A Study of Chinese Speakers’ Perception of Gender-Based Characters

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

The Gendering of Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Natural Gender, and Genderless Languages

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