Reflections on Binary Sex/Gender Categorization in Magnetic Resonance Tomography and its Future Challenges

This paper examines the role of technical, methodological conditions in functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) in the production of binary sex/gender differences. The aim is to investigate the scanning process with a focus on the statistical parameter of gendered markers within the technology, in order to make visible the problems entangled in typical research routines. It is especially important to elaborate this because the computer models currently being used and Big Data studies are reproducing and reapplying outdated and rigid concepts of sex/gender differences with the goal of improving science considerably. Therefore, the paper discusses the empirical methodologies and epistemic underpinnings of differentiation through statistics, and argues that counter-counting, weighing and sizing might not help to substantiate the idea of “equality” (not only for the sex/gender category) in brain studies. In relation to the topic of this special issue, I argue that in order to develop an interdisciplinary approach to criticizing dimorphism and differentiation by groups, a wider understanding of the technical and theoretical foundations used in brain research is needed.

Strategies for Determining German Nouns' Gender by College Students

The article is dedicated to the study of strategies for determining the gender of nouns of the German language by Ukrainian-speaking first-year-students at the Yuriy Fedkovych National University of Chernivtsi, Ukraine. The purpose of the study is to establish the strategies for determining the gender of nouns on the basis of phonetic, morphological, and semantic criteria and experimentally trace the impact of interlingual and intralingual interference in the process of gender categorization of nouns. The material of the study included 60 nouns, out of which 30 were phonetic equivalents and 30 – semantic ones. Each group contained 10 nouns of the masculine, feminine and neuter gender respectively, with the same number of structurally different nouns among them, which were selected according to semantic, morphological, and phonetic rules of gender identification. To identify strategies for determining the gender of German nouns, two psycholinguistic experiments were held with a month interval. The experiments involved 30 first-year-students at the University of Chernivtsi (German department), who had to decide whether the noun gender specified in DMDX program is correct. Thus, the article in half of the given nouns was set incorrectly in the program. The obtained results indicate that the gender of the noun of the native language significantly affects gender determining of the German phonetic equivalent (85% of all mistakes in determining the gender in Experiment 1 and 47% – in Experiment 2). The students also focus on the suffixes or endings of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic rules for determining gender play a secondary role. The gender of a noun in the native language prevents the correct choice of the gender in the German language, which is twice as often recorded for phonetic equivalents.

The Development of Intersectional Social Prototypes

Race and gender information overlap to shape adults’ representations of social categories. This overlap may contribute to the psychological “invisibility” of people whose race and gender identities are perceived to have conflicting stereotypes. The present research ( N = 249) examined when race begins to bias representations of gender across development. Children and adults engaged in a speeded task in which they categorized photographs of faces of women and men from three racial categories: Asian, Black, and White (four photographs per gender and racial group). In Study 1, participants were slower to categorize photographs of Black women as women than photographs of White and Asian women as women and Black men as men. They also were more likely to miscategorize photographs of Black women as men and less likely to stereotype Black women as feminine. Study 2 replicated these findings and provided evidence of a developmental shift in categorization speed. An omnibus analysis provided a high-powered test of this developmental hypothesis, revealing that target race begins biasing children’s gender categorization around age 5. Implications for the development of social-category representation are discussed.

Gender and Age in Funerary Practices in the Ceramic Periods in Central Chile

The Ceramic Periods in central Chile are a scenario of major changes in mobility and subsistence systems, associated with the incorporation of cultigens as the basis of subsistence. In this paper, we present a study of the funerary contexts of the Ceramic Periods in central Chile in order to assess whether in this scenario, generally considered very significant in the low-scale societies studied here, gender categories were constructed or signified, and how this changed over time. The results of the analysis suggest that gender categorization was not always important in this scenario. Among Llolleo groups, the offerings associated with females and children suggest their relation with production spheres; in Bato groups, on the other hand, age categories seem to be more important. In the Late Intermediate Period, it is the collective aspect that appears to be stressed in the funerary contexts.

Mistakes in gender categorization in speech production of foreigners studying Russian

The failure to determine the grammatical gender category of adjectives, ordinal numerals and possessive pronouns in the speech production of foreigners representing a monoethnic (Chinese) group of students is considered from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. The analysis of the written works and oral statements of students studying Russian as a foreign language reveals a mechanism that leads to typical mistakes in this aspect of Russian grammar. Categorization by gender of nouns occurs through cognitive mechanisms of correlation and comparison, namely: by biological gender – motivated, by formal attribute – unmotivated; categorization by gender of adjectives, possessive pronouns and ordinal numerals, as the categorization of secondary (unmotivated) features, is absent for foreign residents. Accordingly, for a foreigner, a cognizable category that does not have an ontological character becomes a difficult obstacle to overcome at the initial stage of language learning.