The Use of Stereotypical Gender Information in Constructing a Mental Model: Evidence from English and Spanish

By Manuel Carreiras, Alan Garnham, Jane Oakhill, K. Cain. 1996

Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical gender of participants in a text influences comprehension. A self-paced reading task was used to present short texts comprising one, two, or three sentences. The first sentence of each text introduced a stereotypically masculine or feminine participant (e.g. doctor, nurse), or a neutral one. The last sentence introduced a pronoun (he/she) that could match or mismatch the gender of the referent. The first experiment, which was carried out in English, showed that reading times for the last sentence were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the pronoun in the last sentence and the stereotypical gender of the referent in the first sentence. In contrast to English, the gender of the participant can be disambiguated by a preceding article (el/la) in Spanish. The results of the second, third, and fourth experiments, which were carried out in Spanish, showed that reading times for the first sentences were longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the article and the stereotypical gender of the participant. However, reading times for the last sentences did not differ. Overall, the results suggest that information about the stereotypical gender of the participants in a text is incorporated into the representation as soon as it becomes available, and that it affects the ease with which the text is understood.

Subfields: Natural Language Processing, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution (2019, background): “For instance, Garnham et al. [1995] and Carreiras et al. [1996] use reading speed tests for gender-ambiguous contexts, and observe faster reading when the reference was “obvious” in Spanish.”
Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beauticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men (2008, background): “Such a result further supports findings such as those of Carreiras et al. (1996), Garnham et al. (2002), and Oakhill et al. (2005), which suggest that people draw inferences about the gender of people immediately when they encounter a stereotyped role name.”
Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models (2023, background): “In the general case, however, a subject-preference has been documented in the linguistic literature [4, 20, 21, 28, 30, 33, 42, 77], and therefore an explanation that states that the subject noun is the more likely antecedent could be considered consistent with the facts.”
Semantics and the electrophysiology of meaning: Tense, aspect, event structure (2004, background): “Although there is some evidence for semantic reanalysis [17, 197], the issue has received less attention than it deserves.”
Can Gender-Fair Language Reduce Gender Stereotyping and Discrimination? (2016, unknown): “…Hamilton, 1988; Gastil, 1990; Ng, 1990), French (e.g., Chatard et al., 2005; Gabriel et al., 2008), German (e.g., Heise, 2000; Stahlberg et al., 2001; Braun et al., 2005; Irmen, 2007), Italian (e.g., Cacciari and Padovani, 2007), Polish (e.g., Bojarska, 2011), and Spanish (Carreiras et al., 1996).”
Processing definitional and stereotypical gender in reference resolution: Evidence from eye-movements (2008, background): “, 1997a) whereas the others examine the effects of discourse contexts but do not compare definitional and stereotypical gender (Carreiras et al., 1996; Duffy & Keir, 2004).”
Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle* (2021, background): “(1995) and Carreiras et al. (1996) use reading speed tests for gender-ambiguous contexts, and observe faster reading when the reference was “obvious” in Spanish. Relatedly, Esaulova, Reali, and von Stockhausen (2014) and Reali, Esaulova, and Von Stockhausen (2015) conduct eye movement studies around”
Influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender during reading: eye movements in pronominal and noun phrase anaphor resolution (2014, background): “In Carreiras et al. (1996), experimental passages started with role nouns, which may have emphasised the question of congruity between grammatical and stereotypical gender and may have caused immediate delays in reading the role noun in cases of incongruity.”
Isolating stereotypical gender in a grammatical gender language: Evidence from eye movements (2014, methodology): “In the self-paced reading experiment with Spanish material conducted by Carreiras et al. (1996), sentences contained a role noun followed by a pronominal anaphor.”
The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution (2003, background): “These nouns were chosen partly from the norms published by Carreiras et al. (1996), and partly on the basis of intuition.”