Information is automatically loaded from words in reading, including inferring the gender of a person in the text from a stereotypical role noun, such as inferring a ‘pilot’ as a man. Previous research has found that if a sentence including a stereotypical role noun is followed by a sentence with a pronoun which mismatches the stereotype e.g., ‘pilot’ and ‘she’, the processing time for readers increases, indicating that this mismatch causes an increased cognitive cost. Prior studies have not investigated potential gender differences for this mismatch effect, including whether male or female stereotype mismatches affect certain gender of readers differently. It was hypothesised that female readers will have an increased reading time of incongruent i.e., mismatched sentence pairings, based upon previous research. 18 participants took part in rating 308 role nouns on a 11-point Likert scale on gender stereotype. The 20 most female and 20 most male rated role nouns were incorporated into sentence pairings, half congruent with the following pronoun and half incongruent. 63 participants, 23 male and 40 female participants took part in a self-paced reading task, instructed to read at their regular reading pace, had each sentence of a pairing displayed sequentially after participants pressed a key. This reading time was recorded for each condition. A mixed ANOVA was conducted including gender of reader as the between-subjects factor and all levels of the two within-subjects factors. Paired-samples t-tests were conducted for significant effects. Overall, incongruent conditions had significantly longer reading times than congruent conditions, reflecting the mismatch effect found previously. Female readers had significantly longer reading times when a male subject filled a stereotypically female role than the reverse. This gender stereotype asymmetry may reflect androcentric ‘male as norm’ views in society. Gender differences in the mismatch effect requires greater psycholinguistic attention in research.
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