Political leadership positions are dominated by men. Arguably the most visible of a society’s positions of power, these positions may be important symbols of women’s ability to lead. If so, levels of female political representation within a society should shape its stereotypes of women’s suitability for political leadership. This project will test this possibility by conducting a secondary analysis of a dataset that measured the stereotypes of women, men and political leaders in 44 countries covering six continents (Nsample = 23,256). Specifically, we will test whether, as a country’s representation of women in political leadership increases, there is a greater increase in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and women than in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and men. We will also conduct exploratory analyses to identity whether other socio-ecological and cultural variables correlate with cross-national heterogeneity in the content and congruence of these stereotypes. This project will shed light on the way in which macro-level variables can shape micro-level gendered leadership beliefs.

Over the last few decades, linguistic gender-fair forms have become increasingly used by individuals and official institutions. In the French-speaking sphere, this has led to heated discussions among politicians and other stakeholders, some of whom claim that these forms render texts illegible and inaccessible to the general public. However, the processing of gender-fair forms in reading has been the topic of a few empirical studies. In the present paper, we add to this small body of research by reporting results from a pre-registered eye-tracking study where 58 native French-speakers read short texts which included a masculine form (voisins), complete double form (voisines et voisins), or contracted double form (voisin & centerdot;es). Consistent with previous findings, the complete double forms were not more costly to process. In contrast, contracted double forms led to increased processing costs in intermediate and late stages of processing, but had no effect on the early stages of processing. Our data also indicate that the processing of contracted double forms becomes easier over time, and that it is facilitated by positive attitudes towards gender-fair language. These findings provide important insights that enlighten the current debate and should therefore be considered in the elaboration of official guidelines regarding gender-fair language.

Abstract Gender is a central notion for analyzing the interface between language and thought. This chapter focuses on how referent gender is handled across languages. It first defines the multiple perspectives from which it can be analyzed. It then reviews the implications of sex-based grammatical gender systems on the representation of women and men in different languages, discussing the markedness of feminine forms that may contribute to making women less salient in society and the impact of treating the masculine form as generic. It also analyzes the different meanings and connotations associated with feminine and masculine versions of the same lexeme, and how they reflect gender stereotypes. It then turns to the question of whether sex-based grammatical gender systems impact the representation of inanimate objects and discusses the possible factors that account for the divergent results found in the abundant literature on this topic. This exploration leads the authors to conclude that natural gender and grammatical gender cannot be treated as two entirely distinct phenomena.

Women are greatly underrepresented in positions of political leadership around the world. In seeking to explain this underrepresentation, some researchers have pointed to people’s tendencies to stereotype leaders as more similar to men than women as these tendencies can support the belief that women are unsuited to leadership. This project aimed to test whether a subtle linguistic intervention was able to ameliorate this gender bias in political leadership stereotypes across different languages and national contexts (country N = 42, sample N = 22,995). Specifically, this project examined whether gender fair language (e.g., the use of paired pronouns ‘he or she’) can reduce the tendency for people to stereotype political leaders as more similar to men than women. To increase the rigor with which these stereotypes were measured, this project complemented the dominant ‘cheap talk’ measure of personal stereotype content with a novel incentivised community measure of this content. As expected, participants stereotyped political leaders as more similar to men than women; this pattern was stronger on the incentivised measure of community stereotypes. Unexpectedly, there was no evidence that paired pronouns reduced this bias (there was weak exploratory evidence that paired nouns increased participants’ tendencies to stereotype political leaders as more similar to women). This project suggests that the ability of gender fair language interventions to ameliorate gender bias in the political leadership domain may be limited.

This article serves as a basis for scientists interested in the cognitive theories that underpin the neural mechanisms by which language use activates stereotypes, and how stereotypes guide perception and decision-making processes. The aim of this article is to provide a review of relevant cognitive and neuroscientific knowledge around how language use influences social stereotypes, which in turn impact social perception; to this end, the article covers language comprehension and production, stereotype formation, stereotype content, group processes, cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in stereotype processing, and the naturalistic outcomes of stereotyping.

In recent years, gender-neutral pronouns have emerged in different languages. We review current research on their emergence and offer an interdisciplinary framework for studying and understanding gender-neutral pronouns. Our framework is aimed at sparking and guiding interdisciplinary research on gender-neutral pronouns. The framework incorporates (cross-)linguistic and cognitive aspects of the function, use and processing of gender-neutral pronouns in light of the fact that different language systems (i.e., conceptual vs. grammatical gender languages) require different degrees of linguistic creativity in order to expand the word class of pronouns. Furthermore, we link these linguistic and cognitive considerations with research on the social-psychological effects of the use of gender-neutral pronouns, more specifically on how they affect the well-being of nonbinary people with regard to social stigmatization and discrimination (minority perspective) as well as how their attitudes are linked with attitudes on non-binary individuals (majority perspective). Integrating these different aspects, we highlight the current gaps in the literature, make concrete suggestions for future research approaches, and emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary research on this multifaceted topic.

Research has shown that the mental representations evoked by Dutch masculine pronouns, even when intended as generic, can be male-biased (Redl, 2021). Such bias can perpetuate gender inequalities in society (e.g., Stout & Dasgupta, 2011), prompting language users to seek more inclusive alternatives, such as gender-neutral pronouns. This study investigates the effect of Dutch gender-neutral pronouns as generic referential strategies on perceived text quality, and maps familiarity with and attitudes toward Dutch gender-neutral pronouns. The first experiment was conducted among a representative sample of Belgian participants, while the second experiment involved a mixed sample of Belgian and Dutch participants, thus facilitating a comparison between the two varieties of Dutch. The results show that gender-neutral pronouns do not affect text comprehensibility. However, the pronoun combination die-die-diens (subject-object-possessive) may impair text appreciation, even among young, highly educated participants familiar with gender-neutral pronouns. This study documents increasing familiarity with gender-neutral pronouns in Flanders and is the first to map familiarity in the Netherlands. Taking into account attitude measures, hen in subject position has little potential to be accepted, but the combination die-hen-hun does show potential. Additionally, our study suggests that plural forms are a viable gender-inclusive referential strategy for those who seek to avoid masculine generics.

The use of a single bipolar gender scale to evaluate the estimated gender breakdown of an occupational group has long been the standard measure for assessing the effects of linguistic-grammatical information and gender stereotypes on the mental representations of gender. However, this scale presupposes a reciprocal relationship between the gender poles, assuming that the estimated number of one gender group constrains the estimation of the other. This is questionable, as distinct linguistic modulations and gender stereotypes may exert asymmetrical influences on each gender group’s representation. The current study, therefore, used gender-separated scales and showed that an inclusive language manipulation on the presentation of occupations can increase the visibility of women when the occupations do not carry feminine stereotype information but can also decrease the visibility of men when the occupations do not carry masculine stereotype information. Using this scale may be a more appropriate approach for future studies to capture the influence of language forms on gender representation in a more nuanced way.

This study investigated the influence of gender stereotypes on adolescents’ vocational aspirations and the potential mitigating effects of gender-inclusive linguistic forms. Building on Fox and Barth’s (2017. The effect of occupational gender stereotypes on men’s interest in female-dominated occupations. Sex Roles , 76 (7–8), 460–472) findings and literature on gender-fair language, we tested if various presentations of occupation titles within healthcare occupational descriptions could decrease the saliency of gender stereotypes. Two hundred and twenty-two adolescents aged between 12 and 19 were provided with descriptions, in French, of healthcare occupations either without any title, in the Masculine grammatical form (the so-called generic form) or in the Pair Form (gender-fair condition). Adolescents’ interest in and anticipated sense of belonging to the presented occupations were measured. Girls’ and boys’ interest in and anticipated sense of belonging to the presented occupations were in line with gender stereotypes, regardless of how the occupations’ titles were presented. We discuss these findings in relation to potential interventions that may help reduce gendered interests in adolescents and health careers.

A good knowledge of connectives like moreover and therefore is crucial for reading comprehension and academic success, yet not all connectives, especially infrequent connectives mostly used in writing, are well mastered even by adults. The main goal of this paper is to assess the possibility to improve the ability to use connectives in discourse during the transitional teenage years. To do so, we examined whether 228 native French-speaking teenagers and 60 adults improved their performance with eight infrequent (prototypical and non-prototypical) connectives in a sentence-completion task after active or passive training. The results revealed that training had only a limited effect on the ability to use both types of connectives, while the degree of exposure to print was an important predictor of individual variations. These findings suggest that connectives’ mastery depends more on exposure to extensive written input that allows to internalize their procedural meaning over time rather than on one-time explicit activation of the mapping between their form and function.

This paper investigates the relationship between morphological productivity and neological intuition, defined as the ability to identify novel words as such. It can be hypothesised that the more productive a word-formation process is, the less salient the neologisms it forms will be. We test this hypothesis experimentally on neologisms formed with prefixes and suffixes of variable productivity. Three experiments are conducted, involving lexical identification and reading tasks with eye tracking, to provide a comprehensive description of neological intuition. The negative correlation between productivity and neological salience is supported by experimental results, but only in the case of suffixed neologisms, as opposed to prefixed ones. The effect of affix type on neological intuition can be explained by differences in the grammatical nature of prefixes and suffixes. Broadly speaking, investigating the linguistic factors of neological intuition provides an original approach to both linguistic and psycholinguistic issues related to word structure and lexical processing.

Recently, researchers have started to experimentally investigate the claim that the grammaticalization of the future may impact our mental representations of future events. Yet, this research has mainly focused on the perceived distance of future events, although with inconclusive results. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the grammaticalization of the future on recognition memory as cognitive mechanism to affect mental representations of future events. We used gain-framed health messages to further explore potential applications of the hypothesized effect. Concretely, participants were presented with sentences containing information about the effects of certain natural remedies. After this presentation, participants were asked to identify the natural remedies that had been presented to them. Using different temporal conditions, we assessed the number of correct answers. No effect of temporal condition was found, suggesting that the proposed theoretical framework may be inaccurate. We discuss possibilities to further discern our results.

When learning a second language, some connectives are more difficult to acquire and to master than others. While previous research has assessed different factors responsible for this difficulty by using offline tasks, little is known about the extent to which L2-readers are sensitive to different connectives while reading . In our study, we compared self-paced reading times of native and non-native speakers of French for sentences that were correctly or incorrectly marked with either the infrequent connective cependant (‘however’) or the more frequent mais (‘but’). Results showed that incorrect uses only produced longer reading times when mais was used. Yet, in a sentence-evaluation-task using the same set of sentences, L2-speakers were able to discriminate incorrectly marked sentences with cependant from correctly marked ones. We conclude that a good theoretical understanding of connectives for L2 (Experiment 2) does not always warrant a quick activation of their meaning while reading (Experiment 1).