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

Abstract

Two eye-tracking studies addressed the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in anaphor resolution in German. The authors investigated pronominal (er ‘he’/sie ‘she’) and noun phrase (dieser Mann ‘this man’/diese Frau ‘this woman’) anaphors in sentences containing stereotypical role nouns as antecedents (Example: Oft hatte der Elektriker gute Einfälle, regelmässig plante er/dieser Mann neue Projekte' Often had the electrician good ideas, regularly planned he/this man new projects'). Participants were native speakers of German (N=40 and N=24 in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Results show that influences of grammatical gender occur in early stages of processing, whereas the influences of stereotypical gender appear only in later measures. Both effects, however, strongly depend on the type of anaphor. Furthermore, the results provide evidence for asymmetries in processing feminine and masculine grammatical gender and are discussed with reference to two-stage models of anaphor resolution.

Keywords:

• anaphor resolution
• grammatical gender
• stereotypical gender
• sentence processing

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 237907. We thank Friederike Braun for her feedback on earlier versions of the paper. At the time of data collection, all authors were affiliated with the Department of Cognitive and Theoretical Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Notes

1. Capitalised subscripts refer to role noun properties (M_MaleMasc=mean value of stereotypically male role nouns in the grammatically masculine form), non-capitalised subscripts refer to the grammatical gender of the anaphor (M_masc=mean value of masculine anaphors).

2. Eye movements have also been reported to reflect such cognitive mechanisms as, for instance, an identification of candidate antecedents or verification of those candidates (Duffy & Rayner, 1990), lexical or semantic access to words (Garrod & Terras, 2000), selective reanalysis in syntactic parsing (Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) and so on.

3. Frequency analyses were based on the corpora from the Archive of written language, Institute for German Language, Mannheim, Germany. Frequencies were collected based on the role noun stems including all inflections. In general, neutral role nouns were more frequent than stereotypically male, which in turn were more frequent than stereotypically female role nouns. However, frequencies did not differ significantly within the groups of stereotypically male, female and neutral role nouns.

4. We would like to thank Chuck Clifton for providing us with software for the analysis of regressions into a region conditionalised by launching region (used in Experiment 1) in addition to other software packages available on the website of the eye-tracking lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (http://www.psych.umass.edu/eyelab/software/).

5. The main effect of typicality in the verb region detected in first fixation durations and first-pass reading times is not relevant for the processes under study and will therefore be included in Table 2 only. It is not reported or interpreted in the text.

6. Frequency analyses were based on the corpora from the Archive of written language, Institute for German Language, Mannheim, Germany. Frequencies were collected for non-capitalised pronouns (‘er’, ‘sie’) and noun phrases ‘dieser Mann’ and ‘diese Frau’ excluding other inflections.