Influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender during reading: eye movements in pronominal and noun phrase anaphor resolution

Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension

“…While some authors claimed that the P600 reflects syntactic processing (e.g., Kim & Osterhout, 2005), recent views suggest that it can reflect more general language integration (e.g., Brouwer et al, 2012), repair and reanalysis (e.g., Friederici, 2011) or more general conflict monitoring (e.g., van de Meerendonk et al, 2010; for a review Kuperberg, 2007). Independently of the functional interpretation of the P600 effect, the similar ERP correlate observed for stereotypical and definitional gender led Osterhout and colleagues (1997) to conclude that stereotypical cues syntactically constrain pronoun resolution (see similar claims by Esaulova et al, 2014). Osterhout et al's (1997) conclusions were mainly driven by the fact that no semantic-related ERP effect was observed for the stereotypical condition, in which world-knowledge inferences (known to elicit semantic ERP correlates such as the N400, Hagoort et al, 2004) could potentially drive pronoun resolution processes.…”

Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German

“…As to the main effect of stereotypical gender, female RN1 required less processing time than neutral RN1. Keeping in mind that the RN1 grammatical gender was always feminine, this may reflect the congruency between stereotypical and grammatical gender cues, which might be higher in the case of female than neutral RN1 (for similar findings see Esaulova et al, 2014).…”

“…Therefore, in our materials the relative pronoun could only refer to either singular feminine or plural role nouns. Since previous research (e.g., Carreiras et al, 1996;Esaulova et al, 2014;Irmen & Schumann, 2011) has shown comprehension difficulties related to mismatching gender cues within role nouns, namely, when stereotypically male role nouns had feminine suffixes (such as in Elektrikerin "electrician:F;STEREOT.MALE"), we only used stereotypically female and neutral role nouns in our materials in order to avoid producing unnecessary mismatch effects that could be confounded with the processing mechanisms under study. 3.…”

How gender-expectancy affects the processing of “them”

“…When a word like mechanic is encountered, and unless there is evidence to the contrary, then an elaborative inference is made that the referent is (probably) male. This information is stored at the dis-course or situation level (for similar claims see Esaulova et al, 2013;Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli, & Cacciari, 2012). Some researchers (e.g., Carreiras et al, 1996;Kreiner et al, 2008) have claimed that the language processing system makes a firm commitment that the mechanic is male, yet others have allowed that a probabilistic inference might be made (Garnham, 2001;Garnham et al, 2002).…”

“…Formally an antecedent is generic wherever the gender of the antecedent is unknown. However, extensive research has shown that antecedents that have a strong gender stereotype might be formally generic but they are not treated as gender-neutral during online language processing (e.g., Esaulova, Reali, & von Stockhausen, 2013;Garnham, Oakhill, & Reynolds, 2002;Kreiner et al, 2008;Oakhill, Garnham, & Reynolds, 2005;Reynolds, Garnham, & Oakhill, 2006;Sturt, 2003). At an intuitive level it follows that there might be a scale of "generic-ness" based on the realworld likelihood, or probability that an antecedent has a specific gender, with low-expectancy antecedents (a cyclist) being treated as highly generic and high-expectancy antecedents (a mechanic) being treated as somewhat generic.…”