Asymmetric Acceptability between Gender Stereotypes and Grammatical Gender: A Study in Two Varieties of Spanish

Abstract

Psycholinguistic evidence regarding the relationship between gender, language, and cognition has been reported in two main directions: the influence of gender stereotypes on language processing, and the impact of grammatical gender marking on cognition. In this context, Spanish represents a paradigmatic language for studying this phenomenon, as it is a grammatical gender language and exhibits documented diatopic variation in both the use and conceptualization of gender. We conducted an acceptability judgment task on noun phrases containing role nouns, using a 3×2 factorial design: gender stereotype (feminine, masculine, neutral) and grammatical gender (feminine, masculine). A total of 113 speakers of Rioplatense Spanish and 154 speakers of Peninsular Spanish participated in the study. We found no marked differences between the diatopic varieties of Spanish, but observed an asymmetric incongruence effect: nouns phrases with stereotypicality male bias and feminine grammatical gender were rated as the least acceptable.