So let’s talk about gender. It’s a construct
that’s a large part of our lives, and we
interact with it in a whole bunch of different ways.
But even for those of us who think that we’ve
gotten beyond gender considerations, there’s
still a lot of unevenness in how our brains
handle the language side of things.
Down to the deepest parts of our minds, we’re
still fighting our preconceptions. I’m Moti
Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So there are two different concepts that linguists
talk about when it comes to gender. The first
of these is called grammatical gender. This
is an abstract concept that gets applied to
nouns, and then matched on the adjectives
and verbs around them.
A whole slew of languages around the world
use gender marking, from French to Polish
to Hebrew to Tamil.
This sort of gender isn’t just assigned
to people, either. Every noun in your language
will get it, even those for ideas and objects.
Like, in French, you get a masculine 'un miroir'
for a mirror, but a feminine 'une épée' for
a sword.
This sort of gender doesn’t always match
across languages, either. So, in German, a
sword isn’t feminine, but it’s neuter
instead, like 'das Schwert'.
For people, though, the terms and genders
usually line up the way we expect.
Let’s look at Irish: the word for boy, buachaill,
is masculine, and the word for woman, bean,
is feminine.
But even that’s not always true: the word
for girl, cailín, turns out to be masculine,
as well.
Grammatical gender is an important concept,
and there’s been a lot of research done
on it:
the variety of gender systems in languages,
and the acquisition of gender, and even how
grammatical gender can actually guide the
interpretation of sentences. And I promise,
we’ll come back to talk about it more in
the future, but for today, we’re going to
focus on the regular, more commonplace meaning
of gender.
So, like it or not, pretty much every society
has culturally conditioned ideas of what qualifies
as masculine or feminine.
Depending on where you’re from, you might
have different expectations about appropriate
behavior for men or women, but you’ll still
have something.
We use those beliefs for a lot of things,
and one of them is to help us quickly build
meanings as words are hurled our way like
a series of rapid fireballs.
Our thoughts about gender influence the way
that we search for our words and build our
sentences. And when you look at how people’s
brains are doing this, it turns out that the
thoughts that we have deep down aren’t always
the most progressive ones. Take, for example,
a 2009 neurolinguistic study that wanted to
see whether stereotypes about gender reached
all the way down into word associations.
The researchers put together a study using
event-related brain potentials, or ERPs, that
we talked about back in Topic 18.
In particular, they wanted to look at whether
associating men or women with words that match
or don’t match stereotypical gender views
caused an N400, the brain’s way of saying,
“Wait, what was that?”
When we talked about the N400 before, we discussed
how it showed the cost of bringing new, unexpected
words into a sentence, even if they were grammatically
correct. So the last word of a sentence like
“Terry kicked the enemy in the chest”
would be easier to process than “Terry kicked
the enemy in the goose.”
Goose might be grammatically correct there,
like, it’s still a noun, but it’s not
an appropriate noun to use. So our poor neurons
have to work extra hard to process the sentence,
and that shows up as an N400.
But it’s not just sentences where we can
find evidence of our brains chugging away.
We can also find similar N400 effects for
word pairs.
Our brains have an easier time matching up
things that are related to each other, like
“tournament” and “champion,” than
things that don’t have any apparent relationship
at all, like “ash” and “modest.” But
a pair like tournament and champion have an
unbreakable tie: if you hold a tournament,
you’ll have a champion.
When it comes to gender, though, there’s
no logical tie that just can’t be broken.
The researchers in the study wanted to see
how their participants’ brains would deal
with processing words that are more associated
with men or women.
To do this, for each item in the study, they’d
first show the word “man” or “woman,”
and then present a second word that’s stereotypically
linked with one gender or the other.
Some of these were traits, like 'nurturing'
or 'aggressive', and some were nouns, like
'makeup' or 'mechanic'. And then the participants
were asked to indicate whether the second
word they heard matched the gender category
of the word before it.
So a round would work like this: the participant,
with the brain-measuring electrode cap on
their head, would first see “man,” and
then “secretary”, and then they would
push a button to show whether they thought
this was an appropriate gender match.
Now, again, it’s important to note, there’s
nothing concrete tying men and women to any
of these terms. Men can wear fancy make-up
and be caring, and women can be aggressive,
tough mechanics.
But we have our socially gendered perception
about who these terms should go with, and
it’s pretty strong.
The researchers in the study found that when
the words matched gender stereotypes, like
'woman' and 'doll', participants answered
quickly and matched them easily.
When the words didn’t match a stereotype,
like 'woman' and 'cigars', they were slower
and more unsure about matching the gender
expectations. And this carried over to their
brains: the N400 effect was much stronger
for the non-matched pairs.
Participants really had a harder time linking
up 'woman' and 'powerful' than 'woman' and
'gossipy'.
So we can find the influence of gender on
how we process words, and even in how our
brains react. But we just don’t really normally
encounter words in isolation.
And people in that study were really primed
to think about gender, I mean, they were explicitly
asked to do just that.
What happens when people are dealing with
full sentences? How does gender influence
you then?
To answer that question, let’s take a look
at a 1997 neurolinguistic study.
This time, the researchers used the power
of reflexive pronouns to look at how gender
influenced interpretation.
Reflexives are items like himself and herself,
and they’re really demanding little terms.
In order to use a reflexive grammatically,
it has to be associated with something in
the sentence.
You can’t just have a sentence like “Himself
fought lots of his clones.” Himself needs
to be somebody, or no fighting can happen.
But more importantly for our purposes, it’s
not enough that there be some noun just be
there to go with himself or herself. It has
to be the right gender, too. If we have a
sentence like “Billy hit himself with the
cane,” that’ll only be good if Billy is
male.
So how can we use these facts about pronouns
to look at gender bias? Well, here’s the
really clever bit: some nouns, by definition,
have to go with one gender or the other.
Nouns like “bachelor” and “king” must
be male, and things like “niece” and “nun” must
be female. That’s just part of their meanings.
But other nouns are only stereotypically connected
to one gender or the other, like we saw before.
It’s not part of the definition of “police
officer” or “pilot” that they be male,
or for “cheerleader” or “model” to
be female. We just have gender biases one
way or the other.
So now, let’s bring the reflexives back
into the mix.
If you have something that, by definition,
has to be male or female, then putting in
the wrong gender reflexive just makes the
whole sentence bad. You can’t say “The
famous ballerina prepared himself for the
performance.”
Ballerina and himself don’t match, and no
matter what kind of stereotypes you have,
there’s nothing you can do to rescue this
sentence. If it’s not 'herself', it’s a
mistake. But if you have something that just
doesn’t match the stereotype, what then?
Take a sentence like “The bouncer taught
herself to identify suspicious behavior.”
Now, that’s a totally fine, grammatical
sentence of English.
The only thing that it requires of you is
that you overcome your gender bias so you
can associate 'bouncer' with 'herself', and you’re
set. But do people do that? To figure this
out, participants were hooked up to the ERP
machine to see what was going on with their
brains.
Then they read sentences where the reflexives
either matched or didn’t match for both
the definitional and stereotypical conditions.
At the end of each sentence, they were asked
to judge whether what they’d just seen was
an acceptable sentence of English. So what did
they find? Well, just looking at the participants’
judgments, the researchers found significant
differences for both cases.
So whether they were driven by grammatical
need or gender stereotype, they still found
the matches significantly better than the
mismatches.
So “The bouncer taught herself” is always
more unacceptable than “the bouncer taught
himself.”
The size of the effect was stronger for the
ones where the noun really needed it by definition,
but both trends were pretty solid.
But let’s step back for a second. “Unacceptable”
can mean a lot of things. It could mean grammatically
bad, like attaching ballerina to himself.
Or it could mean kinda weird from the stereotypical
point of view, like putting beautician with
himself. Maybe people just had a harder time
associating a reflexive with a noun that it
doesn’t usually go with, and that’s why
they called it unacceptable.
They did still find 77% of the stereotypical
mismatch cases okay in the end, too.
So it’s not like they were rejecting female
bouncers all the time, it’s just that they
liked them reliably less than the male ones.
If that’s what’s going on in here, it
should show up in the ERP data as a semantic
mismatch, so the N400.
That’s what the N400 does - it shows you
when you have a hard time fitting a word that’s
grammatically okay into the sentence.
Except… this time, that’s not what the
researchers found. Instead, they found a different
ERP effect, a P600, in both mismatch cases.
But the P600 is associated with syntactic
problems, not semantic ones. It’s what you
get in a sentence like “Shen eat all the
crabs”.
That’s understandable for the cases where
by definition, the words just can’t work
together, like 'niece' and 'himself'.
But it means that rather than seeing 'soldier'
plus 'herself' or 'gymnast' plus 'himself' as okay,
but weird, the initial brain reaction was
just “This is bad. This sentence is just
ungrammatical”.
Now, we can get past these readings. Even
with the brain saying “whoa, this is wrong”
at first, they still eventually accepted the
stereotypical mismatch over three-quarters
of the time.
And no one is saying that women can’t be
powerful, and men can’t be nurturing. But
the findings from neurolinguistics research
so far pretty strongly tell us something that
we may not want to hear. When it comes to
gender, our first interpretations are unfortunately
predictable.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space
for this week. If you overcame your initial
preconceptions, you learned that there are
two kinds of gender in language, grammatical
and sociological; that gender stereotypes
underlie our word associations, whether we
want them to or not; and that in processing
sentences, gender biases temporarily keep
us from considering some legitimate interpretations.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman.
It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us.
Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production
assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music
and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our
graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down
in the comments below, or you can bring the
discussion back over to our website, where
we have some extra material on this topic.
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we’ll see you next Wednesday.
Ne sta eva hose voomatse!
