Pascal Gygax

Université de Fribourg · Département de psychologie

Coherence relations between elements of discourse can be signaled by linguistic devices such as connectives and/or non-connective signals. While the use and comprehension of connectives have been studied in different categories of speakers, less is known about the functioning of non-connective signals of coherence relations, especially in younger p...

Despite the increased use of different types of gender-fair forms in French, studies investigating how they are interpreted when presented in a sentence remain few. To fill this gap, we conducted a pre-registered study using a timed sentence evaluation task to examine the possibility of speakers’ establishing an anaphoric relationship between a gen...

The way the future is grammaticalized in language may influence the way we think about future events. However, recent experimental investigations have led to suspicions that this relationship may not be driven by the future tense alone. Rather than simply considering whether a language uses the future tense to mark the future, it has been suggested...

Although gender inclusive writing is widely polarised in public opinion, the exact causes of reluctance towards its use are not always clear. We explore the link between attitudes towards inclusive writing and different factors, such as the level of linguistic or historical knowledge of inclusive writing. We also measured the political orientation...

When writing a text, the choice between seemingly equivalent connectives, such as but and however, is not arbitrary: aside from preferences linked to the register or modality of the utterance, there are often pragmatic or syntactic constraints that limit the choice to only one particular connective. For French, theoretical approaches have extensive...

Rephrase is a pragmatically complex and persuasively appealing, yet still not systematically explored communication phenomenon. Evidence from corpus data indicates that speakers rephrase frequently in argumentative settings. In light of this empirical evidence, it is a tenable assumption that speakers (are perceived to) gain rhetorical advantages b...

Research often conceptualises complex social factors as being distinct binary categories (e.g., female vs male, feminine vs masculine). While this can be appropriate, the addition of an 'overlapping' category (e.g., non-binary, gender neutral) can contextualise the 'binary', both for participants (allowing more complex conceptualisations of the cat...

The perceived gender ratio of 422 role nouns was evaluated by Chinese- (N = 80), Finnish- (N = 77), and Russian-speaking (N = 134) students using an 11-point rating scale with counterbalanced scale anchors. Data were collected online between 2015 and 2019, via a self-administered questionnaire. The dataset contains all role nouns in English togethe...

The present paper reports findings from a controlled large-scale ( N = 1018) experimental study investigating how four different gender-fair forms influenced native French speakers’ estimated percentage of women compared to the masculine form (interpretable as generic) in 22 non-stereotyped French role nouns. The findings show that the masculine fo...

Following theories of emotional embodiment, the facial feedback hypothesis suggests that individuals’ subjective experiences of emotion are influenced by their facial expressions. However, evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We thus formed a global adversarial collaboration and carried out a preregistered, multicentre study designed to spe...

Important individual differences exist in the way language is acquired by children, and processed by adult native speakers. So far, studies demonstrating those individual differences have focused on lexical and syntactic aspects, yet not on discursive competences. However, we argue that discourse connectives are particularly well suited to investig...

In this chapter, we discuss the extent to which non-native readers rely on discourse connectives to build coherence relations, and whether their reading fluency is affected by missing or misleading connectives. Our hypothesis is that the information conveyed by connectives is less salient when reading in a second language, as L2 processing has been...

In this chapter, we argue that although gendered vocational interests may arise from various sources, language plays an important role, even if it has received little attention so far. Previous studies (Stout & Dasgupta, 2011; Vervecken et al., 2013; Vervecken et al., 2015), although scarce, have demonstrated that language (meaning and structure) c...

The extent to which gender neutral and gendered nouns impact differently upon native French speakers' gender representations was examined through a yes-no forced choice task. Swiss (Experiment 1) and Québec (Experiment 2) French-speaking participants were presented with word pairs composed of a gendered first name (e.g., Thomas) and a role (e.g., d...

French, psycholinguistic studies have shown that the generic use of the masculine gender results in a male bias in mental representations of gender. To counteract this effect, French speakers have begun using various gender-fair forms like joggeur·euses, joggeuses et joggeurs or un groupe de jogging. With the aim of investigating the influence of f...

TO DOWNLOAD PAPER, PLEASE CLICK ON THE DOI In the spirit of the pragmatic account of quotation and reporting offered by Macagno and Walton (2017), we outline a systematic pragmatic account of rephrasing. For this purpose, we combine two interrelated methods of inquiry into the variety of uses of rephrase as a persuasive device: (i) the annotation...

Many connectives, such as therefore and however, are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence‐level insertion task (N = 307,...

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives-for example, rare or polyfunctional ones-might elicit different reading patterns. In order to e...

Psycholinguistic approaches that study the effects of language on mental representations have ignored a potential role of the grammaticalization of the future (i.e., how the future manifests linguistically). We argue that the grammaticalization of the future may be an important aspect, as thinking about the future is omnipresent in our everyday lif...

The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many ha...

« Le médecin a demandé aux collégiens de se laver les mains. » Cette phrase anodine comporte plusieurs ambiguïtés que notre cerveau peine à résoudre. Le médecin est-il une femme ou un homme ? Les collégiens sont-ils un groupe de garçons ou un groupe mixte constitué de filles et de garçons ? Les règles actuelles du français ne permettent pas de le...

This paper investigates how neological intuition (NI), i.e., the metalinguistic ability to evaluate lexical novelty, is influenced by the linguistic properties of novel words. We focus on two properties: (i) formal novelty, depending on whether neologisms result from a morphological operation or are already existing forms that take on new meanings,...

Many studies have demonstrated that stimuli that are easy to process are generally better evaluated compared to stimuli that are harder to process. It is, however, an open question whether people speaking with a foreign accent are judged to be less truthful compared to native speakers due to the greater difficulty of decoding their speech. In this...

We present a preliminary validation of a newly built questionnaire aimed at evaluating people’s openness towards the notion of non-binary gender. To explore the validity of our questionnaire, we ran a principal component analysis to evaluate the existence of three overarching dimensions (Gender Categories, Gender Fluidity, and Gender Definitions) t...

Even though the mastery of discourse connectives represents an important step toward reaching high language proficiency, it remains highly difficult for L2-learners to master them. We conducted an experiment in which we tested the mastery of 12 monofunctional French connectives conveying six different coherence relations by 151 German-speaking lear...

Considering how fundamental and ubiquitous temporal information is in discourse (e.g., Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), it seems rather surprising that the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on the way we perceive the future has only been scarcely studied. We argue that this may be due to its rather abstract nature and how it has been previous...

The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that an individual’s subjective experience of emotion is influenced by their facial expressions. Researchers, however, currently face conflicting narratives about whether this hypothesis is valid. A large replication effort consistently failed to replicate a seminal demonstration of the facial feedback hypoth...

L’utilisation dite générique de la forme grammaticale masculine en français et plus généralement dans les langues indo-européennes, comme par exemple le terme les étudiants pour désigner un groupe mixte, dénote une forme certaine d’androcentrisme. Tout d’abord, elle nous contraint à percevoir le monde au travers d’un prisme masculin. Ensuite, elle...

Connectives are complex lexical items for children, who do not even master connectives used frequently in speech until the end of their primary school years. In this paper, we assess the ability of two groups of 16-year-olds from two different academic levels (i.e., high school vs. professional school students), as well as a group of university stu...

We present two experiments investigating the effect of the perceived gender of a magician on the perception of the quality of magic tricks. In Experiment 1, tricks performed by an allegedly female magician were considered worse than those by an allegedly male magician. In Experiment 2, participants had to generate possible solutions to how the tric...

To test the effectiveness of the Internet-based instrument PsyToolkit for use with complex choice tasks, a replicability study was conducted wherein an existing psycholinguistic paradigm was utilised to compare results obtained through the Internet-based implementation of PsyToolkit with those obtained through the laboratory-based implementation of...

Do we conceptualise the future as being behind us or in front of us? While this question has traditionally been investigated through the lens of spatiotemporal metaphors, new impetus was recently provided by the Temporal-Focus Hypothesis (de la Fuente et al., 2014, Psych Sci). This hypothesis holds that the mapping of temporal concepts onto the fro...

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross-linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in...

In French, and other gender marked languages, there are two ways to interpret a grammatical masculine form when used to refer to social roles or occupations [e.g., les magiciens (the magicians masculine )]. It can refer to a group composed of only men (specific use of the masculine form), or one composed of both women and men (generic use). Studie...

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and incorre...

The role of the sensorimotor system in second language (L2) semantic processing as well as its clinical implications for bilingual patients has hitherto been neglected. We offer an overview of the issues at stake in this under-investigated field, presenting the theoretical and clinical relevance of studying L2 embodiment and reviewing the few studi...

The generic use of grammatically (or lexically) gender-marked nouns and pronouns (GM) to refer to women and men in Indo-European languages has been criticised as gender-asymmetric since the 1970s. Two main strategies for eliminating asymmetry have been suggested: visibility by feminisation and de-gendering by neutralisation. Feminisation strategies...

In this research, we investigated the social influence of newspaper headlines on beliefs on various social, political, and economic issues, including belief in conspiracy theories. Building on the seminal study by Gruenfeld and Wyer (1992), we examined how denials and affirmations printed in a credible source (e.g., a newspaper considered to be ser...

Discourse connectives are often reported to be difficult for second language learners, yet the causes of these difficulties are still not fully understood. In this paper, we test the ability of German-speaking learners to process and understand a connective with a complex form-function mapping in their L2-French, namely “en effet,” a connective tha...

As research on the construction of a mental representation of referent gender in speech comprehension is scarce, this study examined whether factors identified in reading comprehension exert similar influence in speech comprehension. Conceptually replicating previous research, a sentence continuation evaluation task was set up in two modalities, as...

Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in th...

Language (e.g., structure, morphology, and wording) can direct our attention toward the specific properties of an object, in turn influencing the mental representation of that same object. In this paper, we examined this idea by focusing on a particular linguistic form of diminution used in many languages (e.g., in Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese)...

A critical question that has gained a resurgence of interest in recent years is the view that the languages we speak may be responsible for the way we think. In light of two theoretical approaches, linguistic relativity and the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, the present paper offers a review of the empirical methods and findings of research on t...

Language, as a vehicle of representations, can highlight, accentuate or even blur intergroup boundaries. This idea is illustrated by grammatical gender and the normative use of masculine terms in gendered languages, which, although they potentially carry a generic gender meaning, leads to an empirically demonstrated invisibility, or even exclusion...

We present a Focused Review on work that was conducted to compare perceived distributions of men and women in occupations and other social roles with actual real world distributions. In previous work, we showed that means for the two sources were similar and the correlation between them was high. However, in the present paper, although we argue tha...

Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determin...

The generic use of masculine plural forms in grammatical gender languages has been criticised for activating unequal gender representations that are male dominant. The present study examined whether the recently introduced gender-neutral forms of nominalised adjectives and participles in German provide references that induce more balanced represent...

Using a preferential looking paradigm, the current study examined the role that grammatical gender plays when preschool French-speaking toddlers process role nouns in the masculine form (e.g., chanteurs masculine ‘singers’). While being auditorily prompted with “Look at the ‘a role noun’!”, two- and three-year-olds were presented with two picture...

Research on women’s endorsement of sexist beliefs has recently focused on the role of both internalization and subtyping (Becker, 2010), claiming that women reject hostile sexist statements more if they are directed towards the self than if they are directed towards subtypes of women (e.g. career women). In our study, we complement this idea of sub...

Recent studies from countries with grammatical gender languages (e.g., French) found both children and adults to more frequently think of female jobholders and to consider women’s success in male dominated occupations more likely when the jobs were described in pair forms (i.e., by explicit reference to male and female jobholders, e.g., inventeuses...

We present a study comparing, in English, perceived distributions of men and women in 422 named occupations with actual real world distributions. The first set of data was obtained from previous a large-scale norming study, whereas the second set was mostly drawn from UK governmental sources. In total, real world ratios for 290 occupations were obt...

Les pages regroupées ici vous proposent un guide pratique permettant de rapidemment comprendre comment écrire de manière à rendre les femmes et les hommes également visibles dans notre communication quotidienne. Avant de découvrir le guide, notez qu’il ne s’agit pas là d’une démarche visant à un « dictat » du langage, mais bien d’une démarche où l...

Previous research has suggested that some discourse relations are easier to convey implicitly than others due to cognitive biases in the interpretation of discourse. In this paper, we argue that relations involving a perspective shift, such as confirmation relations, are difficult to convey implicitly. We assess this claim with two empirical studie...

Magicians often trick spectators' senses by relying on cognitive limitations. To do so, they use intuitive but age-old knowledge of human cognition. Research into the relationship between magic and psychology has been growing for a number of years now. This work offers an original ground for studying cognitive processes, while also providing the op...

Inferencing is defined as 'the act of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true', and it is one of the most important processes necessary for successful comprehension during reading. This volume features contributions by distinguished researchers in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience on topic...

We analyzed free word associations in Czech, in terms of valence, agency and com- munion, primed by the three concepts of Human, Man and Woman. We were particu- larly interested in possible similarities between them. Although the concept of Human should be inclusive of both men and women, we only found a strong overlap between the concepts of Human...

In this chapter, we present theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the way readers build mental representations of the main protagonists’ emotional status. Based on the highly influential studies of Morton Ann Gernsbacher and her colleagues in the nineties, we present several studies that have attempted to specify the nature of...

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/ ) that we developed to collect these norms and th...

The masculine plural form in French (e.g., musiciens [musicians]), as in other grammatical gender languages, though interpretable as a generic form (e.g., musicians are men and women), has been shown to more likely activate a specific interpretation (e.g., musicians are mainly men). In this study, we presented participants with female or male kinsh...

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of wo...

RÉSUMÉ Dans cet article, nous présentons les recherches, relativement récentes, sur l'intégration du genre dans la représentation mentale d'une lectrice ou d'un lecteur, en mettant l'accent sur leurs controverses ainsi que sur les pistes encore peu (ou pas) explorées. Nous espérons ainsi susciter l'intérêt de la communauté francophone sur ce sujet,...

Dans cet article, nous présentons les recherches, relativement récentes, sur l’intégration du genre dans la représentation mentale d’une lectrice ou d’un lecteur, en mettant l’accent sur leurs controverses ainsi que sur les pistes encore peu (ou pas) explorées. Nous espérons ainsi susciter l’intérêt de la communauté francophone sur ce sujet, jusqu’...

Omniprésent dans nos sociétés occidentales modernes, le sport remplit de nombreuses fonctions positives pour l'individu, mais véhicule aussi des aspects moins reluisants: trop souvent il sert de défouloir et encourage l'agressivité. La rivalité entre les athlètes ou les équipes se fait sans doute à la fois le miroir et le moteur de celle entre supp...

This paper investigated readers’ representations of the main protagonist’s emotional status in short narratives, as well as several mental factors that may affect these representations. General and visuo-spatial working memory, empathy and simulation were investigated as potential individual differences in generating emotional inferences. Participa...

Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was used...

Using a word association paradigm we examined the extent to which readers can overcome the specific interpretation of the grammatical masculine form in French when instructed to embrace its generic meaning. In two experiments participants were to decide whether a person introduced by a kinship term (e.g., aunt) could be part of a group represented...

The present study constitutes an investigation of tobacco consumption, related attitudes and individual differences in smoking or non-smoking behaviors in a sample of adolescents of different ages in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. We investigated three school-age groups (7th-grade, 9th-grade, and the second-year of high school) for differ...

This experiment investigated challenge evaluations in soccer and their relation to prejudice: more precisely, whether skin colour may influence judgments of soccer tackles. Three groups of participants (soccer players, referees,and soccer fans) were asked to evaluate challenges, featuring Black and White players as aggressors and victims in a mixed...

We examined the relationships between three forms of sexism (modern, benevolent, and hostile) and two components of attitudes toward gender-neutral language (attitudes toward gender-related language reforms and recognition of sexist language) across different contexts. A questionnaire study (N = 446) was conducted among students in the United Kingd...