Esaulova, Y. , Reali, C. & Irmen, L.
Department of Cognitive and Theoretical Psychology. University of Heidelberg. Heidelberg, Germany.
In this eye-tracking study we investigated the processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues in pronoun resolution. Materials contained a gender typical role name (e.g., electrician, beautician) in masculine or feminine grammatical gender as an antecedent in the first clause and a pronoun (he or she) as an anaphor in the second. In both early and late measures, masculine pronouns were fixated longer after an incongruent feminine as compared to a masculine antecedent. No reliable effect of antecedent gender was found for feminine pronouns. Typicality did not affect pronoun resolution but role name processing. Fixation times were shorter when the typicality and grammatical gender of the role name were congruent as compared to the incongruent case. This effect was reliable in early stages of processing for typically male role names. Results show that pronoun resolution is mainly guided by grammatical features, such as grammatical gender, whereas role name processing also comprises conceptual information from semantic memory, such as gender typicality. However, masculine and feminine grammatical gender constrain pronoun resolution to a different extent.