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The interpretation of Spanish masculine plural NPs: Are they perceived as uniformly masculine or as a mixture of masculine and feminine?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2022

Alejandro Anaya-Ramírez ,
John Grinstead ,
Melissa Nieves Rivera ,
David Melamed Open the ORCID record for David Melamed [Opens in a new window]  and
Asela Reig-Alamillo Open the ORCID record for Asela Reig-Alamillo [Opens in a new window]
Alejandro Anaya-Ramírez
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Cognitivas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
John Grinstead
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Melissa Nieves Rivera
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
David Melamed
Affiliation:
Translational Data Analytics Institute, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Asela Reig-Alamillo*
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Cognitivas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
*
*Corresponding autor. Email: assela.reig@uaem.mx
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Abstract

This article investigates whether human masculine plural noun phrases (NPs) in Spanish, which can be interpreted with an exclusively masculine or a mixed-gender meaning, are a case of balanced or unbalanced ambiguity. The results of an experiment using a sentence continuation task with oral stimuli are consistent with the claim that masculine grammatical gender biases listeners toward an exclusively masculine interpretation. The acceptance rate of continuations with the pronoun uno/una referring to a masculine plural antecedent showed that the exclusively masculine meaning of the NP is accessed more frequently and involves a lower cognitive cost than the mixed-gender interpretation. Further, this effect interacts with the stereotypicality of the noun: nouns independently established to carry a masculine stereotype are less likely to be associated with a mixed-gender interpretation. The study also found that the speakers’ attitudes toward nonsexist language predict their acceptance of the mixed-gender interpretation of masculine NPs.

Keywords

masculine grammatical gendergender ambiguitygeneric interpretationinclusive language
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 43 , Issue 6 , November 2022 , pp. 1257 - 1274
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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