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Gender inferences: Grammatical features and their impact on the representation of gender in bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2013

SAYAKA SATO ,
PASCAL M. GYGAX  and
UTE GABRIEL
SAYAKA SATO*
Affiliation:
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
PASCAL M. GYGAX
Affiliation:
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
UTE GABRIEL
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
*
Address for correspondence: Sayaka Sato, Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Rue de Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland[email protected]
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Abstract

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of women or men following a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants’ proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language.

Keywords

gender representationgrammatical gendergender stereotypesmasculine formgeneric interpretation
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 792 - 807
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 237907. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier version of the manuscript.

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