LingLunch : Till Poppels

Thursday 25 February 2021, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Philip Miller (LLF)
Lieu: 

Online

Till Poppels (LLF) et al.
Bias against “she” pronouns can be rapidly overcome by changing event expectations

Changing expectations about a future event can manifest rapidly in language use.  During the 2016 US presidential election, von der Malsburg et al. (2020) elicited Americans’ production and comprehension preferences for pronoun references to the then-future next president, potentially a woman (Hillary Clinton) or a man (Donald Trump). Participants’ pronoun production rates changed in close lockstep with expectations regarding the likely election winner, whereas reading times in comprehension were less labile. The study’s main result, however, was a persistent disadvantage for “she” relative to “he” in both production and comprehension, even when the female candidate was expected to win. Since the male candidate won the 2016 election, this study could not address whether and how quickly this disadvantage for “she” pronouns might be overcome in case the female candidate won.

In the present study, we addressed this open question in the context of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by examining pronoun references to the then-future Vice President (VP), either a woman (Kamala Harris) or a man (Michael Pence).  We collected data from 1611 US-based Mechanical Turk participants in two rounds -- pre-election and post-election -- following the design from von der Malsburg et al. (2020).  Pre-election, “she” references were produced less frequently and read more slowly than “he” references even though participants expected the female candidate to win. Shortly after the election, however, both production and comprehension behavior trended towards a reversal: masculine pronouns were less frequent and processed more slowly than feminine pronouns in references to the future VP.  This study thus reconfirms the large, persistent dispreference for using feminine pronouns in references to future office-holders, while at the same time suggesting that this dispreference can be rapidly reversed in light of sufficient changes in event expectations.