Female truck drivers and male babysitters?

Interactions between gender stereotypes and grammatical gender in Spanish and Italian: a psycholinguistic proposal

Abstract

Within studies on the complex relationship between language and gender, there are proposals that indicate an effect of stereotypical mental representations on language processing. Likewise, other proposals indicate that morphological gender marking, typical of languages with grammatical gender, can also bias interpretation. Within the MultiLingualGender project, we are developing a broad research on language and gender in Romance languages. In this paper we present two preliminary studies that also function as normative stage for future psycholinguistic tasks. On the one hand, we developed a study of Gender association judgments, with the objective of verifying the association of role names (professions) with gender stereotypes, but without explicitly involving the lexical form (Study 1). On the other hand, we conducted a study of Acceptability judgments of NP, to analyze the degree of acceptability of NPs that explicitly contained the lexical form (Study 2). In both cases, these are tasks that involve conscious and open judgments. Our results show that there are differences by linguistic community, but there are also some common patterns: for example, the acceptability and possibility of representing men in roles typically associated with women is greater than vice versa. Furthermore, data show that in languages with grammatical gender, the interaction between stereotypicality biases and grammatical gender marking plays a crucial role in understanding the relationship between gender and language in its complexity.