PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the present thesis, a set of visual world eye tracking experiments was presented in which theories from the fields of psycholinguistics, social psychology, and social robotics were combined. Doing so, four main research aims were pursued: First, I investigated whether adverbs’ (Experiment 1 and Experiment 3) and main verbs’ (Experiment 2 and Experiment 4) gender-stereotypicality would guide participants’ visual attention to a target whose gender matched the adverbs’ or the main verbs’ gender-stereotypicality. Second, I tested whether the effect of gender-stereotypicality would be enhanced by a male (vs. female) speaker voice. Third, the effects of ambivalent sexism, normative gender role orientation, motivation to control for sexist responses, and social desirability on language processing were explored. Fourth, investigations were extended to the field of social robotics (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). The adverbs’ and the main verbs’ gender-stereotypicality and the speaker voice did not guide participants’ visual attention to a gender-matching target as hypothesized. Nevertheless, gender-stereotypicality and speaker voice seemed to have affected language processing to some extent. More precisely, in Experiment 1, participants looked at the character whose gender matched the adverbs’ gender-stereotypicality when listening to a female speaker voice, while they looked at the stereotype-inconsistent character when listening to a male speaker voice. In Experiment 3, participants tended to show the hypothesized fixation pattern to look at the target robot whose gender matched the adverbs’ gender-stereotypicality, particularly when listening to a speaker whose gender matched the adverbs’ gender-stereotypicality. Fixation patterns in Experiment 2 and Experiment 4 suggest that participants seemed to have had difficulties to infer the target’s gender from the main verbs’ gender-stereotypicality. Viewed in conjunction, the results of all four experiments imply that language processing seemed to be driven by two motives: First, participants seemingly attempted to comprehend language content. After having comprehended that the sentences referred to a male or a female target, participants apparently attempted to counter gender stereotypes and sexism which was indicated by looks at the stereotype-inconsistent target. This was striking because in previous literature, it had not been considered that participants’ attempts to respond in a non-stereotypical or non-sexist manner could affect language processing. Experiments featuring robot targets furthermore revealed what kind of robots Western participants considered ‘typical’ robots and how their perceptions of robots per se and of the social category robots represented in terms of gender affected participants’ cognitions during language processing. Based on these insights, directions for future research were outlined.