Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias Casado, Alba Sá-Leite, Ana Rita Paolieri, Daniela Gender-congruency effect Gender-priming Grammatical gender activation Gender stereotype Gender identity The aim of the study was to explore the nature of the gender-congruency effect, characterized by a facilitation on the processing of congruent words in grammatical gender. Moreover, we explored whether resemblances between gender identities and gender attitudes with grammatical gender modulated lexical processing. We designed a gender-priming paradigm in Spanish, in which participants decided the gender of a masculine or feminine pronoun preceded by three different primes: biological gender nouns (mapping biological sex), stereotypical nouns (mapping biological and stereotypical information), and epicene nouns (arbitrary gender assignment). We found faster processing of gender congruent pronouns independently of the type of prime, showing that the grammatical gender feature is active even when processing bare nouns that are not conceptually related to gender. This indicates that the gendercongruency effect is driven by the activation of the gender information at the lexical level, which is transferred to the semantic level. Interestingly, the results showed an asymmetry for epicene primes: the gender-congruency effect was smaller for epicene primes when preceding the feminine pronoun, probably driven by the grammatical rule of the masculine being the generic gender. Furthermore, we found that masculine oriented attitudes can bias language processing diminishing the activation of feminine gender, which ultimately could overshadow the female figure 2023-06-28T11:26:26Z 2023-06-28T11:26:26Z 2023-05-23 journal article preprint Casado A, Sá-Leite AR, Pesciarelli F and Paolieri D (2023) Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias. Front. Psychol. 14:1160836. [doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1160836] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/82927 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1160836 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Frontiers