Further evidence of gender stereotype priming in language: Semantic facilitation and inhibition in Italian role nouns

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
CRISTINA CACCIARI ◽  
ROBERTO PADOVANI

Two experiments tested the activation of gender stereotypes for Italian role nouns (e.g.,teacher). The experimental paradigm was modeled on the one proposed by a study by Banaji and Hardin: participants were shown a prime word followed by a target pronoun (heorshe) on which they performed a gender decision task. The prime words were Italian role nouns that had an associated female stereotype, an associated male stereotype, or no associated stereotype (control condition). The results of Experiment 1 showed no influence of stereotypes on the gender decision response to personal pronouns. However, when, in Experiment 2, the prime-target interval and the prime presentation times were prolonged, a stereotypical gender priming effect did emerge. A different inhibition pattern was found when the pronoun was preceded by a noun associated with a male stereotype instead of a female one.

1996 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hideki Ohira

Eyeblink activity was examined based on a discrete-trial paradigm in which 17 subjects engaged in a semantic priming task. They were presented a series of pairs of words (prime and target) associatively related or associatively unrelated and were required to name them as quickly as possible. Cognitive load or difficulty of naming of the target word was also manipulated. The latency data for naming of the target word showed a typical priming effect, namely, facilitation of naming speed by the associatively related prime word. The eyeblink rate changed synchronically to onset of stimuli as a function of prime-target relationship and cognitive load during the task. Specifically, the eyeblink rate was suppressed during presentation of the target word and peaked just after that. This study showed that suppression of eyeblinks was longer on trials with high cognitive loads than on those with low cognitive loads and the peak of eyeblink rate was higher on trials for which the prime and target were unrelated than on those for which they were related. These results suggested that the eyeblink activity is influenced by inner cognitive processes of word recognition.


1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. I. Forster ◽  
C. Davis ◽  
C. Schoknecht ◽  
R. Carter

Form-priming occurs when a prime that is graphemically similar to the target word facilitates processing of the target. In an activation model (such as Morton's logogen model), such an effect can be interpreted as a partial-activation effect. A prime that shares letters with the target must inevitably produce activation in the detectors for both the prime and the target. Alternatively, form-priming could be seen as a special case of repetition-priming, in which the prime actually accesses the entry for the target. It is shown that masked-priming effects in the lexical decision task can be obtained for graphemically related pairs such as bontrast-CONTRAST, but not for four-letter pairs such as bamp-CAMP. It is suggested that the priming effect is controlled by neighbourhood density, short words usually having many neighbours, long words having very few. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that form-priming does occur for four-letter words if the prime and target are drawn from low-density neighbourhoods. For a partial-activation theory, an inhibitory mechanism that is sensitive to the number of prime-neighbours is required to explain the results. Of the several versions of a repetition account considered, the “best match” hypothesis appears to be the most promising: this assumes that priming is limited to the stimulus that best matches the prime. It is also shown that prime-target pairs that are related in form and meaning (e.g. made-MAKE) produce the same priming effect as identical pairs, as predicted by a repetition account that assumes a common entry underlying both forms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 936-952
Author(s):  
Marc Depaepe ◽  
Annette Lembagusala Kikumbi

Generally speaking, colonial education in Congo did not engender a very great widening of consciousness among the local population. Mostly, it resulted in inevitable submission through discipline and order. This was particularly the case for girls, for which fewer initiatives were taken than for boys. Moreover, gender stereotypes from the ‘mother’ country clearly dominated the evolution of female education in Congo. At best girls were trained for care-taking professions. After independence, some Congolese leaders, like Mulele (the first Minister of Education of the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Mobutu (who called himself ‘the founding president of Zaire’) wanted to break the colonial tradition by putting education in a more authentic African context. However, both educational models – the one of Mulele as well as the one of his adversary Mobutu - were in the end not very successful. The least we can say, at the basis of some oral history, is that the pedagogical paradox between the rhetoric of emancipation and the existing everyday educational realities in Africa is far from being solved.


SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824401986150
Author(s):  
Xiaoyun Wang ◽  
Degao Li

To examine the processing of phonological and configurational information in word recognition in discourse reading, we conducted two experiments using the self-paced reading paradigm. The materials were three-sentence discourses, in each of which the last word of the second sentence and the third word from the end of the last sentence formed a prime–target pair. The discourse in which the target word (T) was semantically congruent or incongruent with the prime word was converted into a new version by replacing the T with its homophone or with the control word (con-T) in Experiment 1. Similarly, the Ts were replaced by words that were similar to them in configuration or by the con-Ts in Experiment 2. We adopted mixed-effects modeling to analyze the participants’ reading times to the targets, the first words after the targets, and the second words after the targets. It is concluded that the processing of phonological information begins earlier than that of configurational information in activating the semantic representations for the upcoming words that fit the context in discourse reading.


1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis J. Fuentes ◽  
Pío Tudela

Using a lexical decision task in which two primes appeared simultaneously in the visual field for 150 msec followed by a target word, two experiments examined semantic priming from attended and unattended primes as a function of both the separation between the primes in the visual field and the prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA). In the first experiment significant priming effects were found for both the attended and unattended prime words, though the effect was much greater for the attended words. In addition, and also for both attention conditions, priming showed a tendency to increase with increasing eccentricity (2.3°, 3.3°, and 4.3°) between the prime words in the visual field at the long (550 and 850 msec) but not at the short (250 msec) prime-target SOA. In the second experiment the prime stimuli were either two words (W-W) or one word and five Xs (W-X). We manipulated the degree of eccentricity (2° and 3.6°) between the prime stimuli and used a prime-target SOA of 850 msec. Again significant priming was found for both the attended and unattended words but only the W-W condition showed a decrement in priming as a function of the separation between the primes; this decrement came to produce negative priming for the unattended word at the narrow (2°) separation. These results are discussed in relation to the semantic processing of parafoveal words and the inhibitory effects of focused attention.


1996 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 136-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Curtis D. Hardin

Two experiments tested a form of automatic stereo-typing Subjects saw primes related to gender (e g, mother, father, nurse, doctor) or neutral with respect to gender (e g, parent, student, person) followed by target pronouns (stimulus onset asynchronv = 300 ms) that were gender related (e g, she, he) or neutral (it, me) or followed by nonpronouns (do, all, Experiment 2 only) In Experiment 1, subjects judged whether each pronoun was male or female Automatic gender beliefs (stereotypes) were observed in faster responses to pronouns consistent than inconsistent with the gender component of the prime regardless of subjects' awareness of the prime-target relation, and independently of subjects explicit beliefs about gender stereotypes and language reform In Experiment 2, automatic stereotyping was obtained even though a gender-irrelevant judgment task (pronoun/not pronoun) was used Together, these experiments demonstrate that gender information imparted by words can automatically influence judgment, although the strength of such effects may be moderated by judgment task and prime type


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 3366-3379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minna Lehtonen ◽  
Philip J. Monahan ◽  
David Poeppel

Are words stored as morphologically structured representations? If so, when during word recognition are morphological pieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support models that assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologically complex words. The electrophysiological evidence, however, is inconsistent. We combined masked morphological priming with magneto-encephalography (MEG), a technique particularly adept at indexing processes involved in lexical access. The latency of an MEG component peaking, on average, 220 msec post-onset of the target in left occipito-temporal brain regions was found to be sensitive to the morphological prime–target relationship under masked priming conditions in a visual lexical decision task. Shorter latencies for related than unrelated conditions were observed both for semantically transparent (cleaner–CLEAN) and opaque (corner–CORN) prime–target pairs, but not for prime–target pairs with only an orthographic relationship (brothel–BROTH). These effects are likely to reflect a prelexical level of processing where form-based representations of stems and affixes are represented and are in contrast to models positing no morphological structure in lexical representations. Moreover, we present data regarding the transitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison, which suggests that this factor may modulate early morphological decomposition, particularly for opaque words. The timing of a robust MEG component sensitive to the morphological relatedness of prime–target pairs can be used to further understand the neural substrates and the time course of lexical processing.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Wienholz ◽  
Derya Nuhbalaoglu ◽  
Markus Steinbach ◽  
Annika Herrmann ◽  
Nivedita Mani

Various studies provide evidence for a phonological priming effect in the recognition of single signs based on phonological parameters, i.e., handshape, location and movement. In addition, some of these studies show that phonological parameters influence this effect differently. The current eye tracking study on German Sign Language examined the presence of a phonological priming effect at the sentence level depending on the phonological relation of prime-target sign pairs. We recorded participants’ eye movements while presenting a video of sentences containing either related or unrelated prime-target sign pairs, and a picture of the target and the distractor. The data provided evidence for a phonological priming effect for sign pairs sharing handshape and movement while differing in location. Moreover, a difference between parameters in their contribution to sign recognition was suggested such that recognition was facilitated for signs sharing handshape, but was inhibited for signs sharing location. Showing that sub-lexical features influence sign language processing.


2020 ◽  

The article focuses on the means of gender stereotype verbalization in the English-Ukrainian literary translation. Within the framework of the study, gender is represented as a social and cultural phenomenon which, on the one hand, is constructed in the course of interaction with the reality, on the other hand, it is spread in time and space through language. Recurrent characteristics which are traditionally regarded as feminine/masculine lead to the emergence of stereotypes associated with a certain gender. The stereotypical perceptions turn into the mechanisms of human behavior regulation which determine actions, words, position in the society to be expected from a man/woman. However, various cultural environments are capable of different gender conceptualization due to discrepancies in the historical experience, even geographical location or dominant religion. Consequently, the translator may face difficulties related to the cleavage between the characteristics forming the stereotype in the interacting cultures, including cases when such features vary in their intensity. The presence of fixed gender perceptions entails the emergence of standardized formula for their verbalization, conventional metaphors, epithets, etc. In a broader sense, every linguistic choice of the author which determines the construction of gender for all the characters is relevant for the translator whose task consists in coherent reproduction of every aspect of their personality. Meanwhile, the manifestations of feminine/masculine characteristics in the representatives of a certain gender, that are considered completely natural for one linguistic and cultural community, can prove unusual or even unacceptable. The stylistic presentation of the text, thus, becomes a powerful instrument allowing the translator to manipulate the original and the subtlest shades of meanings embedded by the author to meet the needs and, to a certain extent, expectations of the target audience, while the translator’s interference remains almost imperceptible. Still, considering all the similarities of the source and target cultures, the translator may produce a more vivid message in the target text or, on the contrary, blur some of the author’s ideas through the stylistic devices he/she employs.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document