Gygax et al. (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form), but based on stereotypical information in English. In the present study, a modification of their stimulus material was used to examine the additional potential influence of pronouns. Across the three...
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The influence of stereotype and grammatical information (masculine intended as generic) on the representation of gender in language was investigated using a sentence evaluation paradigm. The first sentence introduced a role name (e. g. The spies came out…) and the second sentence contained explicit information about the gender of one or more of the characters (e. g. …one of the women…). The...
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In this paper we argue that the generic use of the masculine represents a grammatical rule that might be easy to learn but difficult to apply when understanding texts. This argument is substantiated by reviewing the relevant literature as well as the recent work conducted by the GREL Group (Gender Representation in Language) on the interaction between stereotypical and grammatical information in...
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