Irmen, L. & Schumann, E.
Department of Psychology, University of Heidelberg
Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the effects of masculine vs. feminine grammatical gender of role nouns on establishing co-reference relations in German. Participants were presented with sentences of the basic structure My <kinship term> is a <role noun> <prepositional phrase> (e.g. My brother is a singer in a band). Role nouns were either masculine or feminine. Kinship terms were lexically male or female and thereby specified referent gender. Experiment 1 tested a fully crossed design including items with an incorrect combination of lexically male kinship term and feminine role noun (brother - [female] singer). Experiment 2 tested only correct items to control for possible effects of incorrect materials in Experiment 1. In early stages of processing, feminine role nouns, but not masculine ones, were fixated longer in case of a mismatch between grammatical and referential gender. In later stages of sentence wrap-up, sentences with masculine role nouns were fixated longer than those with feminine ones, irrespective of referential gender. Both experiments indicate that, for feminine role nouns, cues to referent gender are integrated immediately, whereas a late integration obtains for masculine forms. Our findings are discussed with regard to the different morphological and referential features of masculine and feminine gender in German.