Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T16:01:01.935Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2007

CRISTINA CACCIARI  and
ROBERTO PADOVANI
CRISTINA CACCIARI
Affiliation:
Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
ROBERTO PADOVANI
Affiliation:
Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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 (he or she) 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 277 - 293
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aprile M. (2005). Dalle parole ai dizionari. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.
Balota D. A. M. (1994). Visual word recognition: The journey from features to meaning. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 303– 358). New York: Academic Press.
Banaji M. R., & Hardin C. D. (1996). Automatic stereotyping. Psychological Science, 7, 136– 141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banaji M. R., Hardin C. D., & Rothman A. J. (1993). Implicit stereotyping in person judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 272– 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barca L., Burani C., & Arduino L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments, and Cognition, 34, 424– 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bendix E. H. (1979). Linguistic models as political symbols: Gender and the generic “he” in English. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 327, 23– 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair I. V., & Banaji M. R. (1996). Automatic and controlled processes in stereotype priming. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1142– 1163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacciari C., & Cubelli R. (2003). The neuropsychology of grammatical gender: An introduction. Cortex, 39, 377– 382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carreiras M., Garnham A., Oakhill J., & Cain K. (1996). The use of stereotypical information in constructing a mental model: Evidence from English and Spanish. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 639– 663.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark H. H. (1973). The language-as-a-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 12, 335– 359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioural sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cohen J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 155– 159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CNR, Institute of Computational Linguistics of Pisa. (1989). Corpus di italiano scritto contemporaneo. Pisa, Italy: Author.
Comrie B. (1999). Grammatical gender systems: A linguist's assessment. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 457– 466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
De Mauro T., Mancini F., Vedovelli M., & Voghera M. (1993). Lessico di frequenza dell'italiano parlato. Milan, Italy: Estalibri.
Duffy S. A., & Keir J. A. (2004). Violating stereotypes: Eye movements and comprehension processes when text conflicts with word knowledge. Memory and Cognition, 32, 551– 559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiske S. T., Lin M., & Neuberg S. L. (1999). The continuum model: Ten years later. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trofe (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 231– 255). New York: Guilford Press.
Fiske S. T., & Neuberg S. L. (1990). A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 1– 74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foundalis H. E. (2002). Evolution of gender in Indo-European languages. Paper presented at the 24th Annual Meeting of The Cognitive Science Society, Fairfax, VA.
Garnham A., Oakhill J., & Reynolds D. (2002). Are inferences from stereotyped role names to characters' gender made elaboratively? Memory and Cognition, 30, 439– 446.Google Scholar
Gernsbacher M. A. (1984). Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 256– 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giacometti M. (2002). Women in Italian universities. Retrieved from www.ilo.unibo.it/wite.
Greenwald A. G., Banaji M. R., Rudman L. A., Farnham S. D., Nosek B. A., & Mellott D. S. (2002). A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept. Psychological Review, 109, 3– 25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardin C. D., & Banaji M. R. (1993). The influence of language on thought. Social Cognition, 11, 277– 308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heredia R. R., & Blumentritt T. L. (2002). On-line processing of social stereotypes during spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology, 49, 208– 221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irmen L., & Roßberg N. (2004). Gender markedness of language. The impact of grammatical and nonlinguistic information on the mental representation of person information. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 23, 272– 307.Google Scholar
Kennison S. M., & Trofe J. L. (2003). Comprehending pronouns: A role for word-specific gender stereotype information. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 355– 378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laudanna A., Thornton A. M., Brown G., Burani C., & Marconi L. (1995). Un corpus dell'italiano scritto contemporaneo dalla parte del ricevente. In S. Bolasco, L. Lebart, & A. Salem (Eds.), III giornate internazionali di analisi statistica dei dati testuali (Vol. 1, pp. 103– 109). Rome: Cisu.
Lenth R. V. (2006). Java applets for power and sample size [Computer software]. Retrieved July 3, 2006, from http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~rlenth/Powe.
McKay D. G., & Fulkerson D. C. (1979). On the comprehension and production of pronouns. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 18, 661– 673.Google Scholar
Neely J. H. (1977). Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Roles of inhibitionless spreading activation and limited-capacity attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 106, 226– 254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oakhill J., Garnham A., & Reynolds D. (2005). Immediate activation of stereotypical gender information. Memory and Cognition, 33, 972– 983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orasanu J., Slater M. K., & Loeb Adler L. (1979). Language, sex and gender: Does “La différence” make a difference? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 327.Google Scholar
Osterhout L., Bersick M., & McLaughlin J. (1997). Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes. Memory and Cognition, 25, 273– 285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padovani R., & Cacciari C. (2003). Il ruolo della trasparenza morfologica delle parole in Italiano. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 4, 749– 771.Google Scholar
Posner M. I., & Snyder C. R. R. (1975). Attention and cognitive control. In R. Solso (Ed.), Information processing and cognition (pp. 55– 85). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schiffrin R. M., & Schneider W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84, 127– 190.Google Scholar
Smith M. C., & Besner D. (2001). Modulating semantic feedback in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 8, 111– 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturt P. (2003). The time course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 542– 562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar