Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Some English nouns occur in gender-marked pairs, which fall into two classes: In the Superordinate class, the unmarked(masculine) form is available to refer to female referents (”Allison Janey is a good actor”), whereas in the specific classit is not (*”Diana is a good prince”). Two theories account for this alternation: The Featural Theory proposes that theunmarked are unspecified for gender features. The second, Frequency Theory proposes relative frequency of the markedvs. unmarked forms are responsible (Haspelmath, 2006). This work provides evidence against the frequency theory byemploying a self-paced reading study that tests relative processing times of anaphoric pronouns referring to genderednouns. If noun pairs are split along Specific/Superordinate class lines, a processing slowdown is found for processingprocessing pronoun gender mismatches, except for nouns like ’actor’, as expected. However, when the noun pairs are splitby relative frequency the effect disappears.