EXPRESS: Inferring Pink- and Blue-Collar Jobs: Children's Eye Movements When Reading Gender Stereotyped Occupations.

Authors

Rebecca L Johnson, Merrick Fahrenwald, Nika V Dolynuk, Ashley Lupien, Emily Cleveland, Sara Klompus, Sylvia Lavin

Published in

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006). Pages 17470218261488037. Sep 02, 2026. Epub Sep 02, 2026.

Abstract

Adult readers form inferences while they read, including those corresponding to expectations about the stereotypical gender associated with particular occupations (e.g., Duffy & Keir, 2004). For example, when reading "The surgeon reminded herself to check on the patient," adult readers experience a "mismatch effect" when they encounter the unexpected mismatching female pronoun. The current study aimed to explore whether or not children, ages 8-12 years old, draw gendered inferences about occupations while they are reading sentences. The eye-movement record indicated that developing readers do show a gender mismatch effect. Readers had longer total reading times, longer second pass reading times, and made more regressions out of the pronoun in the mismatch condition compared to the match condition. Pronoun mismatch also affected skipping rates, total times, go-past times, and regressions out of the two-word post-pronoun region. Overall differences as a function of pronoun type, reader's age, occupation gender, and occupation familiarity are also reported.

PMID:
42683767
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Sep 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.