THE USE OF STEREOTYPICAL GENDER INFORMATION IN CONSTRUCTING A MENTAL MODEL - EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH AND SPANISH

Four experiments were carried out to investigate how general knowledge about the stereotypical gender of participants in a text influences c omprehension. A self-paced reading task was used to present short text s comprising one, two, or three sentences. The first sentence of each text introduced a stereotypically masculine or feminine participant (e .g. doctor, nurse), or a neutral one. The last sentence introduced a p ronoun (he/she) that could match or mismatch the gender of the referen t. The first experiment, which was carried out in English, showed that reading times for the last sentence were longer when there was a mism atch than when there was a match between the gender of the pronoun in the last sentence and the stereotypical gender of the referent in the first sentence. In contrast to English, the gender of the participant can be disambiguated by a preceding article (el/la) in Spanish. The re sults of the second, third, and fourth experiments, which were carried out in Spanish, showed that reading times for the first sentences wer e longer when there was a mismatch than when there was a match between the gender of the article and the stereotypical gender of the partici pant. However, reading times for the last sentences did not differ. Ov erall, the results suggest that information about the stereotypical ge nder of the participants in a text is incorporated into the representa tion as soon as it becomes available, and that it affects the ease wit h which the text is understood.