Prominence of gender cues in the assignment of thematic roles in German
- Two eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N-1 = 32, N-2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.
Author details: | Yulia EsaulovaORCiDGND, Chiara RealiORCiDGND, Lisa von StockhausenORCiD |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271641700008X |
ISSN: | 0142-7164 |
ISSN: | 1469-1817 |
Title of parent work (English): | Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners |
Publisher: | Cambridge Univ. Press |
Place of publishing: | New York |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2017/05/09 |
Publication year: | 2017 |
Release date: | 2022/04/11 |
Volume: | 38 |
Number of pages: | 40 |
First page: | 1133 |
Last Page: | 1172 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Psychologie |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
Peer review: | Referiert |