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Effekte des generischen Maskulinums und alternativer Sprachformenauf den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen
Abstract
Zusammenfassung. In der feministischen Linguistik wird angenommen, das maskuline Bezeichnungen, die generisch benutzt werden (Bezeichnungen von Personen beiderlei Geschlechts durch die maskuline Form, wie z.B. die Wissenschaftler, die Studenten), weibliche Personen weniger vorstellbar oder sichtbar machen als mannliche Personen. Verschiedene experimentelle Untersuchungen konnten diese Annahme fur den englischen Sprachraum bestatigen. Fur die deutsche Sprache existieren dagegen bislang sehr wenige Studien zu dieser Frage. Es werden vier Experimente vorgestellt, die untersuchen, ob unterschiedliche Sprachversionen - ,Beidnennung‘ (Studentinnen und Studenten), ,Neutral‘ (Studierende), ,Generisches Maskulinum‘ (Studenten) und “Groses I“ (StudentInnen) - den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen beeinflussen. Uber alle Experimente hinweg zeigte sich, das bei Personenreferenzen im generischen Maskulinum ein geringerer gedanklicher Einbezug von Frauen zu beobachten war als bei alternativen Sprachformen wie der Beidne...
... Las investigaciones que se han realizado hasta ahora han explorado la influencia del género gramatical en la categorización y la percepción (Belacchi y Cubelli, 2011;Beller, Brattebo, Lauik, Reigstad y Bender, 2015;Braun, Sczesny y Stahlberg, 2005) tanto de objetos animados como inanimados. Se ha explorado tanto con sustantivos individuales (Stahlberg, 2001;Stahlberg y Sczesny, 2001) como plurales (Irmen, 2007;Esaulova, 2014;Gabriel et al., 2017). ...
... Las investigaciones que se han realizado hasta ahora han explorado la influencia del género gramatical en la categorización y la percepción (Belacchi y Cubelli, 2011;Beller, Brattebo, Lauik, Reigstad y Bender, 2015;Braun, Sczesny y Stahlberg, 2005) tanto de objetos animados como inanimados. Se ha explorado tanto con sustantivos individuales (Stahlberg, 2001;Stahlberg y Sczesny, 2001) como plurales (Irmen, 2007;Esaulova, 2014;Gabriel et al., 2017). ...
... La revisión bibliográfica sobre este tema se ha hecho en idiomas con género gramatical como alemán (Irmen, 2007;Stahlberg y Sczesny, 2001); francés y noruego (Gabriel et al., 2017) que usan al masculino como genérico 21 Los resultados de dichos estudios se pueden resumir de la siguiente manera: ...
La presente investigación consiste en un trabajo experimental sobre la interpretación de los sintagmas nominales masculinos plurales humanos (por ejemplo, los ciudadanos). Estos sintagmas, que presentan morfológicamente el género masculino en español, son ambiguos entre dos interpretaciones: una exclusivamente masculina y una genérica, en la que se referirían a un grupo mixto de hombres y mujeres. La cuestión de si estas dos interpretaciones son igualmente accesibles, es decir, si al interpretar el SN se activan por igual ambas representaciones de su referente y cómo se desambiguan estas expresiones es el objeto de estudio de esta tesis.
... Gender is so strongly linked with humanness that, when an individual is mentioned in text or speech, we mentally assign a gender to themeven when gender is neither referenced nor relevant (Cacciari & Padovani, 2007;Carreiras et al., 1996;Irmen & Roßberg, 2004;Stahlberg & Sczesny, 2001). When gender is not explicitly indicated, this happens based on implicit information sources (Banaji & Hardin, 1996;Reynolds et al., 2006). ...
This paper explores how the use of gender ratios to inform stimulus selection affects the activation of gendered social information. It investigates if stimuli selected this way can activate gender stereotype knowledge and/or conceptual gender knowledge. This was tested through attribute naming (Study 1) and rating (Study 2) tasks, with component and regression analysis allowing for examination of the nature of gender ratios at both attribute and component levels. The results provide rich information about the nature of gender ratio information as a means of stimulus selection, and in doing so support both conceptualisations as long as researchers acknowledge their overlap. The results also indicate that these roles elicited both positive/prescriptive (i.e., the role is appropriate for a given gender) and negative/proscriptive beliefs (i.e., the role is not appropriate for a given gender). These findings hold important implications for future research using gender ratios.
... w języku niemieckim (JN), co uzasadnia ich zdaniem użycie uniwersalnego rodzaju męskiego w odniesieniu do obu płci (Eisenberg, 2020). Badania psycholingwistyczne dowodzą jednak, iż ze względu na stereotypy kulturowe związane z płcią męskie formy nazw zawodów sugerują zarówno w opinii kobiet, jak i mężczyzn płeć męską desygnatu, przez co kobiety nie czują się w pełni adresatkami tych określeń (Stahlberg, Sczesny, 2001;Irmen, Steiger, 2005). Debata językowa na temat JR toczy się w Niemczech i w dyskursie publicznym, i naukowym. ...
This paper focuses on gender-fair language and the attitudes of teachers and students of German as a foreign language (DaF) towards its use in university teaching. In the context of the survey study presented here, gender is understood as a construct that is manifested in specific, changing language use variants, such as in personal names. The surveyed teachers and students of applied linguistics at the University are current and future DaF linguists and educators, who, due to social changes, will be increasingly confronted with the issues under study in their professional lives. The aim of the study is, firstly, to determine whether gender-fair language is addressed in the DaF courses under study, if so, in what form and to what extent, and secondly, to record and describe the attitudes of the studied groups towards it, in order to raise awareness of this important phenomenon of contemporary German language use. Consequently, the conducted survey provides information about the presence of gender issues in DaF courses and the attitudes of the two groups towards gender-fair language. The results of the study are discussed in terms of their contribution to the development of gender-sensitive didactics of German as a foreign and as a second language.
... This suffix 'is an indispensable means of achieving female visibility, a situation very different from current English, which has no productive word-formation pattern for the derivation of female terms' (Bußmann and Hellinger, 2003: 153). The other side of the coin is that because the masculine class of personal nouns is used to form agent nouns but can also be used to exclusively address or refer to male persons, it is systematically ambiguous, and its use can -according to psycholinguistic experiments on written language (see, for example, Stahlberg and Sczesny, 2001;Blake and Klimmt, 2010) -result in a mentally less distinct representation of non-male persons. Hence, the use of forms that can be interpreted either generically or as referring to men exclusively can -depending on the co-and context, as well as the referential mode (see, for example, Zifonun, 2018)prompt people to have male-biased associations. ...
Germany is a prime example of a country where the use of gender-sensitive language is the subject of public controversy and debate. This study provides a quantitative content analysis of all ( N = 72) German televised debates aired on the federal and state level from 1997 until 2022 to explore the determinants of the use of gender-sensitive language by political candidates. We find that the use of gender-sensitive language has increased over time, but the effect is small and not robust. Party affiliation correlates with candidates’ linguistic behaviour, indicating that conservative candidates use less gender-sensitive language. Candidates’ gender and party affiliation, as well as parties’ socio-political positions, interact in predicting the use of gender-sensitive language. Candidates also change their use of gender-sensitive language from one debate to another. Compared to liberal/left-wing candidates, these changes are less likely to be associated with an increase in gender-sensitive language for conservative candidates.
While research using behavioural methods has repeatedly shown that generic masculines in German come with a male bias, computational methods only entered this area of research very recently. The present paper shows that some assumptions made by these recent computational studies – treating genericity as an inflectional function and computing a vector for generic usage strongly correlated with the grammatical masculine – are not without issue, and offers the use of semantic instance vectors as a possible solution to these issues. Beyond this methodological improvement, the present paper finds that generic masculines are indeed semantically more similar to specific masculines than to specific feminines – results that are in line with findings by the recent computational studies and the majority of previous behavioural studies.
Geschlecht als ein heiß diskutiertes Thema in den Sozialwissenschaften steht in engem Zusammenhang mit Sprache, und die Diskussion über geschlechtergerechte Sprache nimmt stetig zu und treibt den Sprachwandel in der Gesellschaft voran. Deutsch und Chinesisch sind zwei sehr unterschiedliche Sprachen, und es fehlt noch an Forschungen, die aus der Perspektive geschlechtergerechter Sprache Gemeinsamkeiten und Unter- schiede zwischen den beiden Sprachen untersuchen. Daher versucht dieser Beitrag, den Forschungsstand und die Ergebnisse im Bereich geschlechtergerechter Sprache im Deutschen und Chinesischen seit den 1970er und 1980er Jahren zusammenzufassen und zu vergleichen, um die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen den beiden un- terschiedlichen Gender-Sprachen zu analysieren, die gegenwärtigen Forschungsprobleme und -schwierigkeiten herauszufinden und mögliche zukünftige Entwicklungsrichtungen auf diesem Gebiet vorherzusagen.
Grammatical gender form influences readers’ mental gender representations. Previous research demonstrates that the generic masculine form leads to male-biased representations, while some alternative forms lead to female-biased representations. The present research examines the recently introduced glottal stop form in spoken language in German, where a glottal stop (similar to a short pause), meant to represent all gender identities, is inserted before the gender-specific ending. In two experiments (total N = 1188), participants listened to sentences in the glottal stop, the generic masculine, or the generic feminine form and classified whether a second sentence about women or men was a sensible continuation. The generic feminine and the glottal stop led to female biases (fewer errors in sentences about women vs. men) and the generic masculine led to a male bias. The biases were smaller for the glottal stop and the generic masculine than for the generic feminine, indicating that the former two are more readily understood as representing both women and men.
Most German nouns that can be used to refer to people or groups of people have a masculine (e.g., Lehrer ‘male teacher’) and a derived feminine (e.g., Lehrerin ‘female teacher’) form. The grammatically masculine nouns are typically viewed as being ambiguous between a reading which can only be used to refer to men and a reading which can be used to refer to mixed-gender groups (the so-called “generic masculine“). The main question of the present article is whether this generalization also holds for the first elements of nominal compounds (e.g., Lehrer - in Lehrerzimmer ‘teachers’ room’) and for inherently masculine nouns from which no feminine form can be derived (e.g., Gast which is inherently masculine). The empirical data discussed suggest that generic masculine forms used as the first elements of N-N compounds as well as inherently masculine nouns are interpreted rather generically, i.e., not as referring to male individuals only.
This experiment investigated the propensity of the generic he to evoke images of males relative to he/she and the plural they. Undergraduates read sentences aloud and verbally described the images that came to mind. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that the generic he evokes a disproportionate number of male images. Results also suggest that while the plural they functions as a generic pronoun for both males and females, males may comprehend he/she in a manner similar to he. Theoretical implications for a critique of sexist language and prescribing generic pronoun usage are considered.
Despite recent efforts to eliminate sexist language from journal and other publications, controversy persists over whether sexist language contributes to the perpetuation of sex bias. Seventy-two female and 57 male undergraduates were exposed to three levels of sexist noun and pronoun usage in a description of Ethical Standards of Psychologists. All subjects then rated the attractiveness of a career in psychology for males and females, and their own willingness to refer a male or female friend to a psychologist. In several instances, ratings of career attractiveness and willingness to refer were found to vary in sex-role stereotypic directions as a function of degree of exposure to sexist language. Recent demands for nonsexist language may be supportable on the basis of a genuine relationship between sexist language and the maintenance of sex-biased perceptions.
Van Orden (1987) reported that false positive errors in a categorization task are elevated for homophonic foils (e.g., HARE for A PART OF THE HUMAN BODY). Two new experiments replicate this finding and extend it to nonword homophone foils (e.g., SUTE FOR AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING). False positive errors to nonword homophone foils substantially exceed false positive errors to nonhomophonic nonword spelling controls, showing that the phonological characteristics of the nonword foils are critical. Because nonwords are not represented in the lexicon, this new result implicates computed phonological codes as a source of the categorization errors. Additionally, in each of two experiments, matched word and nonword homophones produced virtually identical error rates. If stimulus nonword homophones are viewed as extremely unfamiliar words, compared with the relatively familiar stimulus word homophones, then our failure to observe an effect of stimulus familiarity strengthens the case that phonological coding plays a role in the identification of all printed words. The fact that the results are obtained in a categorization task that requires reading for meaning (rather than a lexical decision task) makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that phonological mediation plays a role in normal reading of text for meaning.
A naturalistic experiment investigated the effects of language reforms on several aspects of thought. Half of the students in an introductory psychology class received corrections any time they used "he" as a generic pronoun in their written work; the other half received no corrections to their written language use. At the end of the semester, all students completed measures of their language use, their gender imagery, and their attitudes to-ward language reforms. Results showed that the language corrections did reduce students' subsequent use of gender-biased language but did not affect their imagery nor their attitudes toward language reforms. Additional results revealed thatgender imagery was related to the gender connotations of the language encountered in the imagery task, especially for female students, and to language use for students who did not receive corrections. Implications of these results for the debate about the masculine generic prescription are discussed.
Two studies are reported which indicate that both sex-biased wording in job advertisements and the placement of help-wanted ads in sex-segregated newspaper columns discourage men and women from applying for “opposite-sex” jobs for which they might well be qualified. Both studies were originally conducted and presented as part of legal testimony in actual sex discrimination cases.
Four experiments investigated whether subjects understand the supposedly generic he generically. In Experiment I, subjects responded YES if an auditorily presented sentence could refer to a female and otherwise NO. Responses were 98% correct for sentences containing sex-specific nouns and pronouns, but 87% incorrect (i.e., NO) for sentences containing generic he. In Experiment II, subjects heard identical sentences but responded YES if the sentence could refer to a male. Responses were 99% correct, indicating high availability of the concept “male” for sentences containing generic he. In Experiment III, responses were 97% incorrect with she substituted for he in otherwise identical generic sentences. Experiment IV determined the effect of removing the pronouns from the sentences. The results inspired a general model of processes underlying the comprehension and production of pronouns.