Open AccessThe Interaction of Morphological Gender With Stereotypical Information: An Eye Tracking Study on Gender Inferences
Author(s) -
Daniela Ronca,
Vincenzo Moscati
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
international journal of linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1948-5425
DOI - 10.5296/ijl.v11i4.15169
Subject(s) - psychology , comprehension , noun , grammatical gender , sentence , cognitive psychology , eye tracking , sentence processing , noun phrase , tracking (education) , mental model , social psychology , linguistics , artificial intelligence , cognitive science , computer science , pedagogy , philosophy
In this paper we observe the time-course and the activation of gender stereotypes comparing the predictions of two competing models: the Minimalist (McKoon et al., 1992) and the Mental Model Hypothesis (Garnham 2001). The on-line processing of sentences containing male-biased stereotypes is experimentally investigated in Italian on epicenes nouns (i.e. nouns that do not morphologically disambiguate between male and female referents) adopting a procedure based on the Visual World paradigm.Eye-movements during sentence comprehension show that stereotypes become immediately active as soon as male-biased role nouns are encountered, as predicted by the Mental Model Hypothesis. Our results also show that when disambiguating cues based on morphological agreement are provided, the activation of stereotypes is blocked. This indicates that morphological gender is quickly processed and that it can suppress stereotypical gender biases.