Gender inferences: Grammatical features and their impact on the representation of gender in bilinguals

Abstract

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of women or men following a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated to the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants' proficiency in their L2; high proficient L2 participants resembling closer to native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language.

Altering Male-Dominant Representations

“…Such findings suggest that new L2 grammatical forms that have or lack specific gender associations may be acquired in parallel with one's native language, to the point that they may affect readers' gender representations. These findings concur with those of Sato et al (2013) who reported that bilinguals may alter their representational tendencies in function of the languages shifts they undergo during reading processes.…”

Linguistic prescription, ideological structure, and the actuation of linguistic changes: Grammatical gender in French parliamentary debates

“…It is a robust generalization from psycholinguistic studies that, at least when minimal context is provided, masculine g-gender most often triggers reference to socially male individuals. This has been shown through a variety of association tasks (Brauer and Landry, 2008;Chatard et al, 2005;Gygax et al, 2012), possible continuation tasks (Gygax et al, 2008;Sato et al, 2013), eye tracking experiments (Irmen and Schumann, 2011), and can also be seen in the interpretation of neologisms (Bonami and Boyé, 2017). 32 So a theory of the meaning of g-gender marking must take into account the existence of a relationship between masculine g-gender and male social gender and feminine grammatical gender and female social gender.…”

Specificity of Emotion Inferences as a Function of Emotional Contextual Support

“…More specifically, we explicitly asked participants, for each narrative, to decide, as fast as possible, whether the target sentence was a sensible continuation of the preceding narrative. This task has been used in a number of experiments interested in mapping processes of particular information to its antecedent context (e.g., Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1990, on anaphoric resolution; Reynolds, 2012, andSato, Gygax, &Gabriel, 2013, on gender inferences). In this task, response latencies are particularly important and informative, as they precisely signal (i.e., more precisely than reading times according to Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1990) the ease in which certain textual elements can be mapped onto readers' mental representation of the text.…”