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Fall 2017

Marrville, Caelan

This dissertation examines the association between the emotional dominance of verbs and the perception, or inference, of character gender. In the context of this dissertation, emotional dominance is described as the perceived level of power, or control, exerted by a verb. I hypothesize that when

analysis into patterns of co-occurrence between verbs and gender- marked verbal arguments. I continue through a series of five experimental psycholinguistic experiments that focus on the association between emotional dominance and character gender through two modalities: implicit causality bias and gender

four reading tasks, I find converging evidence that the association between gender and dominance significantly affects measures of reading time. Significant interactions are reported based on the dominance of verbs and the gender of stereotypical roles and occupations, gender-marked pronouns and