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A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language

Siegling, AB; Eskritt, M; Delaney, ME; (2014) A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language. Current Psychology , 33 (4) 479 - 500. 10.1007/s12144-014-9224-7. Green open access

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Abstract

We investigated the role that linguistic abstraction may play in people's perceptions of gender in spoken language. In the first experiment, participants told stories about their best friend and romantic partner. Variations in linguistic abstraction and gender-linked adjectives for describing their close others were examined. Participants used significantly more abstract language to describe men compared to women, possibly reflecting a gender stereotype associated with the dispositionality factor of linguistic abstraction. In a second experiment, a new group of participants judged the gender of the protagonists from the stories generated in Experiment 1, after the explicit linguistic gender cues were removed. Consistent with the dispositionality factor, linguistic abstraction moderated the effects of the gender stereotypicality of the context (masculine, feminine, or neutral) on participants' gender judgments. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for the communication of gender stereotypes and the effects of linguistic abstraction in more naturalistic language.

Type: Article
Title: A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s12144-014-9224-7
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9224-7
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s) 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.
Keywords: Gender, Linguistic abstraction, Linguistic category model, Spoken language, Stereotypes
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1432927
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