Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our world knowledge is deeply embedded in language. The word “banana” immediately brings to mind the color “yellow”. Oftentimes, however, when we read about “banana”, we do not expect the color “yellow” to be explicitly mentioned as in “yellow banana”. Frequent omission of obvious information given our world knowledge is predicted by so-called informativity expectations, which capture our preferences for newsworthy and informative utterances. Here we present two studies investigating informativity expectations in a socially situated context of gender stereotypicality and testing whether expressions like “female nurses” are less preferred than expressions like “female directors”. While the results show a clear impact of informativity expectations, effects of gender stereotypes turn out to be difficult to overcome.