The scope of grammatical gender in Spanish: Transference to the conceptual level
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Elsevier
Materia
Grammatical gender Spanish Stereotypes Lexical access Sex
Fecha
2021-06-25Referencia bibliográfica
Alba Casado, Alfonso Palma, Daniela Paolieri, The scope of grammatical gender in Spanish: Transference to the conceptual level, Acta Psychologica, Volume 218, 2021, 103361, ISSN 0001-6918, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103361]
Patrocinador
Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness PCIN-2015-165-C02-01 PSI2017-89324-C2-1Resumen
The aim of the present study was to explore under what circumstances we could observe a transference from
grammatical gender to the conceptual representation of sex in Spanish, a two-gender language. The participants
performed a lexical decision task and a gender decision task in the auditory modality, including words referencing
inanimate entities associated with males or females. The sex stereotype could be congruent (falda [skirt],
feminine) or incongruent (corbata [tie], feminine) with the grammatical gender. If the transfer from grammatical
gender to conceptual information related to sex is settled, we should observed faster access for the congruent
words compared with the incongruent ones both in the gender decision task and in the lexical decision task. The
results showed a facilitation while processing congruent vs. incongruent words where attention to gender was
mandatory during the adapted gender decision task. However, there was a lack of transference during the lexical
decision task that might have been caused by the absence of direct conceptual activation by the time the decision
was made. Additionally, we found that grammatical gender and sex-related information are closely connected,
such as the indexical information about the sex of the speaker primes the activation of information related to sex
at the conceptual (sex stereotype) and also at the lexical level (grammatical gender). Altogether, the results
indicate that gender congruency effect is magnified by direct gender activation.