Implicit Stereotyping of Regional Accented Speech and Gender in Pronoun Resolution

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Fitzner, Victoria

• This study investigates the activation of gender stereotypes through the use of reference
  in pronoun resolution. More precisely, the question asked in this thesis is how social stereotypes
  activated through the speaker's voice (based on their gender and accent) affect language
  processing when what is being said conflicts with stereotypical beliefs about the speaker. While
  the effects of these variables have been investigated individually, few studies examine their
  effects together, and how they collectively interact to affect how language is processed. Through
  a self-paced listening task, we measured participants’ listening times to sentences containing
  gender stereotyped role nouns (e.g. cheerleader or farmer ) with pronouns ( he / she ) either
  congruent or incongruent with stereotypical gender of the role noun referent, spoken by either a
  male or female with a French-Canadian accent. We also administered the Emotional Quotient
  questionnaire and a political ideology questionnaire to explore how a listener's empathy levels
  and political ideology interact with stereotyping to affect processing. Listening times were
  significantly slower to incongruent stereotype gender/role noun pairings than congruent,
  especially with male stereotype gender violations, and particularly when spoken by a male.
  However, the male and female conditions saw a reverse effect, showing an asymmetry of male
  and female stereotype processing in the target and spillover segments. Additionally, higher
  empathy ratings correlated with slower listening times with incongruent stereotype gender
  conditions in the target segment. In the wrap-up segment, political ideology had an effect, where
  more progressive participants processed incongruent items faster, while more conservative
  participants reacted more slowly. The above effects appeared differentially, depending on the
  segment of the sentence, suggesting a difference in the time course of the integration of various
  types of stereotype information. These results demonstrate a need to further examine the
  interaction of stereotypes in language processing.

• Date created

  2020-12-20

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Psycholinguistics, pronoun resolution, language comprehension, gender stereotypes, political ideology, empathy, personality, self-paced listening, accented speech

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-g9sg-9v76

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International