Processing grammatical gender of role nouns: Further evidence from eye movements

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the effects of masculine versus feminine grammatical gender on the processing of role nouns and on establishing coreference relations. Participants read sentences with the basic structure My <kinship term> is a <role noun> <prepositional phrase > such as My brother is a singer in a band. Role nouns were either masculine or feminine. Kinship terms were lexically male or female and in this way specified referent gender, i.e., the sex of the person referred to. Experiment 1 tested a fully crossed design including items with an incorrect combination of lexically male kinship term and feminine role name. Experiment 2 tested only correct combinations of grammatical and lexical/referential gender to control for possible effects of the incorrect items of Experiment 1. In early stages of processing, feminine role nouns, but not masculine ones, were fixated longer when grammatical and referential gender were contradictory (Bruder _male–Sängerin _fem/brother–[female] singer). In later stages of sentence wrap-up there were longer fixations for sentences with masculine than for those with feminine role nouns. Results of both experiments indicate that, for feminine role nouns, cues to referent gender are integrated immediately, whereas a late integration obtains for masculine forms.

Keywords:

• Grammatical gender
• Referential gender
• Role noun processing

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Chiara Reali, Yulia Esaulova, Friederike Braun, Pascal Gygax, an anonymous reviewer, and to the editor Klaus Rothermund for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Johanna Emich, Uwe Holderied, Jessica Horn, Marie Tews, and Alexandra Vogel for their help in collecting the data.

Notes

¹This software can be downloaded from the home page of the eye tracking lab of UMass at Amherst, USA. Many, many thanks to Chuck Clifton for making available all these helpful resources.

²Residual fixation times result from subtracting fixation times predicted for a particular region on the basis of a linear regression equation, relating length to fixation time, from the original fixation times measured for that region. This correction was applied to all measures of fixation time reported later.

³No reliable effects were found in first fixation times before the spillover region. This means that the earliest effects on eye movements in the present study were found in first pass reading times of the role noun.

⁴We are not aware of any quantitative data on the actual prevalence of masculine forms in reference to men, to men and women, and to women in German. However, the widespread generic use of the masculine is beyond dispute, and Bußmann and Hellinger (2003) give examples that illustrate the use of masculine forms for female referents.