Non-gendered pronoun processing: an investigation of the gender non-specific third person singular pronoun ‘TA’ in Chinese

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, “TA,” in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender pronouns in reference to antecedents with varying stereotypical gender (e.g., occupation terms) and definitional gender (e.g., kinship terms). In our analysis, we assessed several means of operationalizing stereotypical gender information. Optimal model performance was achieved with a continuous measure that accounted for individual differences in gender perception, suggesting the involvement of a probabilistic component. Results for reading latencies and perceived appropriateness of TA support previous findings from discourse analysis that TA is not entirely gender-neutral but rather has nuanced contexts of use in modern Chinese written discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so the data that support the findings of this study are not available. However, all visual sentence stimuli, corresponding comprehension questions, questionnaire items, and the analysis code have been posted publicly on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/n65hd/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (752-2021-2541 and 752-2022-1171).