This book examines whether masculine plural role nouns in French trigger a male-specific interpretation. By closely replicating the French sample of an experiment run by Gygax et al. in 2008, Experiment 1 suggests that stereotypically male, neutral and female masculine role nouns tend to be associated with men. Experiment 2 focuses on the role noun type of stereotypically neutral role nouns (occupational nouns vs. non-occupational nouns) and indicates that the masculine role nouns were interpreted as referring to both men and women. While the findings of Experiment 1 align with an extensive body of previous empirical research, the results of Experiment 2 challenge most previous findings. In other words, the interpretation of masculine role nouns seems to be influenced by multiple factors and appears to be a complex phenomenon. In this vein, the approach sketched in this book is a step towards understanding the interpretation of masculine role nouns as a multifactorial phenomenon.

Clara Stumm taught and conducted research in Romance linguistics at the Institute for Classical and Romance Philology at the University of Bonn. Her work focuses on language and gender, language and cognition, and replication research.