Marie,
It seems that there should be norms for this in the literature. I've had students who were interested in gender stereotypes associated with language. some may have developed their own validation of stimuli (by having a few individuals rate their stimuli to confirm their intuitions about male/female categorizations for words or pictures). If they found formal norms, I might have a copy (but that would be in my files at the office and I am at home now).
I did a few searches in PsycINFO to see what I could turn up. I ran across two things that might be relevant to your interests (and the puzzle posed by others on the list about grammatical gender versus social gender in language use):
Kennison, S. M. & Trofe, J. L. (2003). Comprehending pronouns: A role for word-specific gener stereotype information. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 355-378.
They describe an initial study in which they collected gender stereotype informatin for 405 nouns and noun compounds to identify 32 "masculine" and 32 "feminine" words for use as materials in a later experiment. No indication in the abstract whether they publish the norms or the items selected.
Regarding the grammatical gender / social gender question:
Caccoaro. C., Carreiras, M., & Cionini, C. B. (1997). When words have two genders: Anaphor resolution for Italian functionally ambiguous words. Journal of Memory & Language, 37, 517-532.
They discuss a manipulation in which the gramatical gender (they call this morphosyntactic gender) and what they call semantic gender (which, I assume refers to the social stereotype aspect of gender in language) either matched or mismatched. As one might expect, gender matches were associated with faster processing (during reading) and mismatches slowed processing.
Lastly, you might check the Psychonomic Society's web pages. They have an archive of stimulus norms published in their journals. it is searchable by key words. I found one item on the site that might be relevant:
Crawford, J. T., Leynes, P. A., Mayhorn, C. B. & Bink, M. L. (2004). Champagne, beer, or coffee? A corpus of gender-related and neurtal words. Behaviora Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 36, 444-458.
Hope these help!
Claudia Stanny
-----Original Message-----
From: Marie Helweg-Larsen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Sun 1/16/2005 3:25 PM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
Cc:
Subject: Masculine/feminine words?
Hi all
I'm looking for a categorization scheme for determining if words (not
traits) are feminine or masculine. For example, you might think of
"butterfly" as feminine and "slug" as masculine but I need some sort of
categorizing scheme for putting nouns into either feminine, masculine or
neutral categories.
All the research I've found so far (google and psychinfo plus various
gender texts) seem to focus on traits (lots of references to Bem) not
nouns but that must be done by someone?!
Marie
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