Démêler les effets des stéréotypes et le genre grammatical dans le biais masculin : une approche expérimentale

Abstract

This paper presents a new psycholinguistic experimental paradigm, allowing to untangle the impact of grammatical gender and gender stereotypes on human-referring noun phrases in French.On the one hand, traditional and prescriptive grammars (e.g. Académie Française, Grevisse & Goose 2008) argue that masculine grammatical gender in French is a neutral or “undifferentiated” gender. On the other hand, feminist literature (e.g. Houdebine-Gravaud 1995) and recent psycholinguistic studies (e.g. Gygax et al. 2008 ; Gygax et al. 2019) have argued that masculine grammatical gender triggers a mental representation of male referents. Our experiments align with these studies: masculine gender is also interpreted as referring to men. In addition, our experimental paradigm is the first to enable to quantify the semantic contribution of grammatical gender (both masculine and feminine) to the meaning of its referent, vis a vis French speakers’ belief.

Keywords

• grammatical gender
• French
• gender stereotypes
• gender bias
• psycholinguistics