So let’s talk about gender. It’s a construct that’s a large part of our lives, and we
interact with it in a whole bunch of different ways. But even for those of us who think that we’ve
gotten beyond gender considerations, there’s still a lot of unevenness in how our brains
handle the language side of things. Down to the deepest parts of our minds, we’re
still fighting our preconceptions. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
So there are two different concepts that linguists talk about when it comes to gender. The first
of these is called grammatical gender. This is an abstract concept that gets applied to
nouns, and then matched on the adjectives and verbs around them.
A whole slew of languages around the world use gender marking, from French to Polish
to Hebrew to Tamil.
This sort of gender isn’t just assigned to people, either. Every noun in your language
will get it, even those for ideas and objects. Like, in French, you get a masculine 'un miroir'
for a mirror, but a feminine 'une épée' for a sword.
This sort of gender doesn’t always match across languages, either. So, in German, a
sword isn’t feminine, but it’s neuter instead, like 'das Schwert'.
For people, though, the terms and genders usually line up the way we expect.
Let’s look at Irish: the word for boy, buachaill, is masculine, and the word for woman, bean,
is feminine. But even that’s not always true: the word
for girl, cailín, turns out to be masculine, as well.
Grammatical gender is an important concept, and there’s been a lot of research done
on it: the variety of gender systems in languages,
and the acquisition of gender, and even how grammatical gender can actually guide the
interpretation of sentences. And I promise, we’ll come back to talk about it more in
the future, but for today, we’re going to focus on the regular, more commonplace meaning
of gender.
So, like it or not, pretty much every society has culturally conditioned ideas of what qualifies
as masculine or feminine. Depending on where you’re from, you might
have different expectations about appropriate behavior for men or women, but you’ll still
have something. We use those beliefs for a lot of things,
and one of them is to help us quickly build meanings as words are hurled our way like
a series of rapid fireballs.
Our thoughts about gender influence the way that we search for our words and build our
sentences. And when you look at how people’s brains are doing this, it turns out that the
thoughts that we have deep down aren’t always the most progressive ones. Take, for example,
a 2009 neurolinguistic study that wanted to see whether stereotypes about gender reached
all the way down into word associations.
The researchers put together a study using event-related brain potentials, or ERPs, that
we talked about back in Topic 18. In particular, they wanted to look at whether
associating men or women with words that match or don’t match stereotypical gender views
caused an N400, the brain’s way of saying, “Wait, what was that?”
When we talked about the N400 before, we discussed how it showed the cost of bringing new, unexpected
words into a sentence, even if they were grammatically correct. So the last word of a sentence like
“Terry kicked the enemy in the chest” would be easier to process than “Terry kicked
the enemy in the goose.”
Goose might be grammatically correct there, like, it’s still a noun, but it’s not
an appropriate noun to use. So our poor neurons have to work extra hard to process the sentence,
and that shows up as an N400. But it’s not just sentences where we can
find evidence of our brains chugging away. We can also find similar N400 effects for
word pairs.
Our brains have an easier time matching up things that are related to each other, like
“tournament” and “champion,” than things that don’t have any apparent relationship
at all, like “ash” and “modest.” But a pair like tournament and champion have an
unbreakable tie: if you hold a tournament, you’ll have a champion.
When it comes to gender, though, there’s no logical tie that just can’t be broken.
The researchers in the study wanted to see how their participants’ brains would deal
with processing words that are more associated with men or women.
To do this, for each item in the study, they’d first show the word “man” or “woman,”
and then present a second word that’s stereotypically linked with one gender or the other.
Some of these were traits, like 'nurturing' or 'aggressive', and some were nouns, like
'makeup' or 'mechanic'. And then the participants were asked to indicate whether the second
word they heard matched the gender category of the word before it.
So a round would work like this: the participant, with the brain-measuring electrode cap on
their head, would first see “man,” and then “secretary”, and then they would
push a button to show whether they thought this was an appropriate gender match.
Now, again, it’s important to note, there’s nothing concrete tying men and women to any
of these terms. Men can wear fancy make-up and be caring, and women can be aggressive,
tough mechanics. But we have our socially gendered perception
about who these terms should go with, and it’s pretty strong.
The researchers in the study found that when the words matched gender stereotypes, like
'woman' and 'doll', participants answered quickly and matched them easily.
When the words didn’t match a stereotype, like 'woman' and 'cigars', they were slower
and more unsure about matching the gender expectations. And this carried over to their
brains: the N400 effect was much stronger for the non-matched pairs.
Participants really had a harder time linking up 'woman' and 'powerful' than 'woman' and
'gossipy'.
So we can find the influence of gender on how we process words, and even in how our
brains react. But we just don’t really normally encounter words in isolation.
And people in that study were really primed to think about gender, I mean, they were explicitly
asked to do just that. What happens when people are dealing with
full sentences? How does gender influence you then?
To answer that question, let’s take a look at a 1997 neurolinguistic study.
This time, the researchers used the power of reflexive pronouns to look at how gender
influenced interpretation. Reflexives are items like himself and herself,
and they’re really demanding little terms. In order to use a reflexive grammatically,
it has to be associated with something in the sentence.
You can’t just have a sentence like “Himself fought lots of his clones.” Himself needs
to be somebody, or no fighting can happen. But more importantly for our purposes, it’s
not enough that there be some noun just be there to go with himself or herself. It has
to be the right gender, too. If we have a sentence like “Billy hit himself with the
cane,” that’ll only be good if Billy is male.
So how can we use these facts about pronouns to look at gender bias? Well, here’s the
really clever bit: some nouns, by definition, have to go with one gender or the other.
Nouns like “bachelor” and “king” must be male, and things like “niece” and “nun” must
be female. That’s just part of their meanings. But other nouns are only stereotypically connected
to one gender or the other, like we saw before.
It’s not part of the definition of “police officer” or “pilot” that they be male,
or for “cheerleader” or “model” to be female. We just have gender biases one
way or the other. So now, let’s bring the reflexives back
into the mix. If you have something that, by definition,
has to be male or female, then putting in the wrong gender reflexive just makes the
whole sentence bad. You can’t say “The famous ballerina prepared himself for the
performance.”
Ballerina and himself don’t match, and no matter what kind of stereotypes you have,
there’s nothing you can do to rescue this sentence. If it’s not 'herself', it’s a
mistake. But if you have something that just doesn’t match the stereotype, what then?
Take a sentence like “The bouncer taught herself to identify suspicious behavior.”
Now, that’s a totally fine, grammatical sentence of English.
The only thing that it requires of you is that you overcome your gender bias so you
can associate 'bouncer' with 'herself', and you’re set. But do people do that? To figure this
out, participants were hooked up to the ERP machine to see what was going on with their
brains. Then they read sentences where the reflexives
either matched or didn’t match for both the definitional and stereotypical conditions.
At the end of each sentence, they were asked to judge whether what they’d just seen was
an acceptable sentence of English. So what did they find? Well, just looking at the participants’
judgments, the researchers found significant differences for both cases.
So whether they were driven by grammatical need or gender stereotype, they still found
the matches significantly better than the mismatches.
So “The bouncer taught herself” is always more unacceptable than “the bouncer taught
himself.” The size of the effect was stronger for the
ones where the noun really needed it by definition, but both trends were pretty solid.
But let’s step back for a second. “Unacceptable” can mean a lot of things. It could mean grammatically
bad, like attaching ballerina to himself. Or it could mean kinda weird from the stereotypical
point of view, like putting beautician with himself. Maybe people just had a harder time
associating a reflexive with a noun that it doesn’t usually go with, and that’s why
they called it unacceptable.
They did still find 77% of the stereotypical mismatch cases okay in the end, too.
So it’s not like they were rejecting female bouncers all the time, it’s just that they
liked them reliably less than the male ones. If that’s what’s going on in here, it
should show up in the ERP data as a semantic mismatch, so the N400.
That’s what the N400 does - it shows you when you have a hard time fitting a word that’s
grammatically okay into the sentence.
Except… this time, that’s not what the researchers found. Instead, they found a different
ERP effect, a P600, in both mismatch cases. But the P600 is associated with syntactic
problems, not semantic ones. It’s what you get in a sentence like “Shen eat all the
crabs”. That’s understandable for the cases where
by definition, the words just can’t work together, like 'niece' and 'himself'.
But it means that rather than seeing 'soldier' plus 'herself' or 'gymnast' plus 'himself' as okay,
but weird, the initial brain reaction was just “This is bad. This sentence is just
ungrammatical”.
Now, we can get past these readings. Even with the brain saying “whoa, this is wrong”
at first, they still eventually accepted the stereotypical mismatch over three-quarters
of the time. And no one is saying that women can’t be
powerful, and men can’t be nurturing. But the findings from neurolinguistics research
so far pretty strongly tell us something that we may not want to hear. When it comes to
gender, our first interpretations are unfortunately predictable.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you overcame your initial
preconceptions, you learned that there are two kinds of gender in language, grammatical
and sociological; that gender stereotypes underlie our word associations, whether we
want them to or not; and that in processing sentences, gender biases temporarily keep
us from considering some legitimate interpretations.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production
assistant is Stephan Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our
graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the
discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material on this topic.
Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday.
Ne sta eva hose voomatse!