scholarly journals COVID-19 is Feminine: Grammatical Gender Influences Future Danger Perceptions and Precautionary Behavior

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alican Mecit ◽  
L. J. Shrum ◽  
Tina M. Lowrey
Keyword(s):  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Behavioral Measures ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Precautionary Behavior ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Online Search Behavior ◽  
Gender Influences

Gendered languages assign masculine and feminine grammatical gender to all nouns, including nonhuman entities. In French, Italian, and Spanish, the name of the disease resulting from the virus (COVID-19) is grammatically feminine, whereas the virus that causes the disease (coronavirus) is masculine. In this research, we test whether the grammatical gender mark matters. In a series of experiments with French and Spanish speakers, we find that grammatical gender affects virus-related judgments consistent with gender stereotypes: feminine- (vs. masculine-) marked terms for the virus decrease perceptions of future danger of the virus and reduce intentions to take precautionary behavioral measures to mitigate contraction and spread of the virus (e.g., avoiding restaurants, movies, travel). Secondary data analyses of online search behavior for France, Spain, and Italy further demonstrate this negative relation between the anticipated threat (daily new cases and deaths, search for masks) and usage of the feminine- (vs. masculine-) marked terms for the coronavirus. These effects occur even though the grammatical gender assignment is semantically arbitrary.

Assignment of grammatical gender by native speakers and foreign learners of French

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. M. HOLMES ◽  
B. DEJEAN DE LA BÂTIE
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Explicit Instruction ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Real Word ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Written Production ◽  
On Line ◽  
Gender Attribution

This study compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. Both groups performed on-line gender assignment to real nouns whose gender was regular or exceptional, given their ending, and to invented nouns with nonword stems and real-word endings. The pattern of results indicated that the native speakers' gender attributions were primarily based on rapidly evoked lexical associations, with gender-ending correspondences playing a significant but subsidiary role. The foreign learners were less able to summon lexical associations, relying heavily on ending-based rules. Overall, none of the foreign learners attained the same level of performance as any of the native speakers. We conclude that instruction in which students learn nouns in the context of distinctive lexical associates could profitably be supplemented by explicit instruction in gender-ending regularities.

Transfer of Spanish grammatical gender to English: Evidence from immersed and non-immersed bilinguals

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 700-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIS MORALES ◽  
DANIELA PAOLIERI ◽  
ROBERTO CUBELLI ◽  
M. TERESA BAJO
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Language Immersion ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Congruent Condition ◽  
Native Spanish Speakers ◽  
Transfer Effects ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Word Task

In this study we explored whether native Spanish speakers’ knowledge of grammatical gender in their native language (L1) affects speech production in a second language (L2) which lacks this feature (English). We selected Spanish–English bilinguals for testing who were immersed in either an L1 or an L2 context. Using a picture–word task, participants had to name pictures in their L2 while ignoring distractor words that could be either gender-congruent or gender-incongruent according to the Spanish translation. Results revealed that non-immersed participants were slower naming the pictures in the congruent condition, suggesting that bilingual people are influenced by knowledge about gender in their native language, even when producing utterances in a language in which this information does not apply. However, no such influence was observed for immersed bilinguals, suggesting that immersion environment attenuates access to the native language. We interpret our results as evidence of transfer effects between languages with different lexical systems, which seem to depend on language immersion.

Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mickan ◽  
Maren Schiefke ◽  
Anatol Stefanowitsch
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Original Experiment ◽  
Experimental Procedure ◽  
Association Task ◽  
Gender Categories

AbstractIn this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary considerably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

scholarly journals Accessing grammatical gender in German: The impact of gender-marking regularities

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNETTE HOHLFELD
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Times ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
The Impact

The present study investigated whether German speakers compute grammatical gender on the basis of gender-marking regularities. To this purpose two experiments were run. In Experiment 1, participants had to assign the definite article to German nouns in an online task; in the second experiment, participants were confronted with German nouns as well as nonwords in an untimed gender assignment task. In the online experiment, which required the repetition of a visually presented noun with its corresponding definite article as fast as possible, reaction times show that the assignment of the definite determiner to a noun is not facilitated by gender-marking regularities. In an offline gender assignment task, however, participants profited from gender cues during gender assignment to nonwords.

Lesion-site affects grammatical gender assignment in German: Perception and production data

2007 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 954-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane Hofmann ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz ◽  
Anke Marschhauser ◽  
D. Yves von Cramon ◽  
Angela D. Friederici
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Lesion Site ◽  
Gender Assignment

scholarly journals La perspectiva de género en la formación inicial docente en la Educación Física chilena (The gender perspective in initial teacher training in Chilean Physical Education)

Retos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 326-335
Author(s):  
Carlos Matus-Castillo ◽  
Miguel Cornejo-Améstica ◽  
Franklin Castillo-Retamal
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Training ◽  
Physical Education ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Current View ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Initial Teacher Training ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Object Of Study

  El presente trabajo tiene como propósito entregar una visión actual de la formación inicial docente de la educación física chilena desde la perspectiva de género, tomando como referencias la participación del estudiantado y el desarrollo de este enfoque en la formación pedagógica del futuro profesorado. En el estudio se han empleado el análisis descriptivo de datos secundarios y el análisis de fuentes documentales, tales como bases de datos, informes institucionales, propuestas teóricas y metodológicas e investigaciones nacionales e internacionales. El trabajo ha permitido identificar que en Chile existe una relevante infrarrepresentación femenina en los estudios de pedagogía en educación física; que se siguen reproduciendo los estereotipos de género; no se identifican acciones tendientes a la incorporación, tratamiento y evaluación de la perspectiva de género en esta formación, es el caso de la inclusión de este enfoque en los planes y programas de estudios; y que a nivel investigativo y metodológico predominan las orientaciones cualitativas. Los estudios de género en el ámbito de la formación inicial del profesorado de educación física en este país se muestran como un campo de trabajo abierto, ya sea a nivel de objeto de estudio, como en los enfoques teóricos y metodológicos, siendo a la vez un área que necesita de una transferencia real por parte de las acciones académicas y políticas que se identifican en la literatura.  Abstract. The aim of this work is to provide a current view on initial teacher training in Chilean physical education from a gender perspective, taking as references the participation of students and the development of this perspective in the pedagogical training of future teachers. The study has used the descriptive analysis of secondary data and the analysis of documentary sources, such as databases, institutional reports, theoretical and methodological proposals, and national and international research. The work has identified that in Chile there is a relevant under-representation of women in studies of physical education pedagogy; that gender stereotypes continue to be reproduced; that no actions are identified to incorporate, treat and evaluate the gender perspective in this training, as it is the case with the inclusion of this approach in curricula and that at the research and methodological level, qualitative orientations predominate. Gender studies in the field of initial training of physical education teachers in this country are shown to be an open field of work, both at the level of the object of study and in the theoretical and methodological approaches, being at the same time an area that needs real transference by the academic and political actions identified in the literature.

scholarly journals Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Piazza ◽  
Marco Calabria ◽  
Carlo Semenza ◽  
Cecilia Poletto
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Healthy Participants ◽  
Gender Processing

Background. Previous studies have argued that two types of linguistic gender exist: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim. We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence comprehension.Methods and Procedure. Eleven people with aphasia and a control group of 13 age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (“enfermera”, nurse; indicating the sex of the referent), Grammatical gender (“silla”, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (“tomate”, tomato).Results. People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition.Conclusion. We propose that semantic and grammatical gender entail two levels of gender processing and that semantic gender is processed faster because it provides more salient information.

scholarly journals Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alena Kirova ◽  
José Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Critical Period ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
L2 Spanish ◽  
And Control ◽  
L1 English ◽  
Do So

According to representational accounts (Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004), the inability to acquire abstract syntactic features after a critical period explains L2 difficulties with gender, while according to lexical accounts (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2012), gender assignment issues – the inability to assigned to a target-like class accounts for these difficulties. We explore three potential agreement cues: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological transparency cues, and 3) syntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender. Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and seventeen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. This suggests that they did not effectively use agreement cues to assign gender. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of gender agreement difficulties, against the representational accounts.

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