Lourdeur de texte et féminisation

Dans notre étude, nous avons testé l’idée, avancée par l’Académie française (2002), que la féminisation du langage alourdissait le texte. Pour cela, nous avons fait lire à 40 étudiantes et étudiants cinq descriptions de différentes professions. Pour chacune de ces professions, quatre descriptions différentes ont été rédigées: une version avec la profession au masculin, une avec la profession au féminin et deux versions avec la profession sous formes épicènes. La vitesse de lecture des descriptions de professions sous une forme épicène ou féminine, même si celleci était plus lente à la première occurrence du nom de métier, retrouvait son rythme normal, ceci dès la deuxième occurrence, indiquant un effet d’habituation. Les résultats indiquent par ailleurs que la féminisation des noms de métiers ne joue pas de rôle quant à la valorisation ou la dévalorisation de ces métiers.In this paper, we tested the idea, raised by the Académie française (2002), that writing role names in both masculine and feminine forms would hinder reading. We presented 40 participants with different texts focused on several professions. The role names were written in one of four grammatical forms : masculine, feminine, or one of two epicène forms (i.e., mécanicien-ne-s or mécaniciens et mécaniciennes). Our study shows that although reading speed was slower on the first encounter of the role names when written in the epicène and feminine form, on the second and third encounter, the speed reached a normal reading speed, suggesting a rapid habituation effect. We also did not find any hint of devaluation of the role names due to the grammatical form of the role names

Machinability study on drilling austenite stainless steel 316l1 using minimum quantity lubrication (MQL) on surface roughness

This research was carried out to determine the optimum condition of cutting speed, feed rate and point of angle while drilling the austenite stainless steel in order to get the good surface finish by using Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL). This project focuses on the drilling small hole on the austenite stainless steel by using milling machine. The aim of this project is to find the optimum condition in producing the good surface finish in drilling process with MQL. The Taguchi OA from software Minitab 16 was used to formulate the experiment, to analyze the three factors and also to predict the optimal choices of the drilling parameters. The selected cutting speeds for the drilling process are 15m/min, 25m/min and 35m/min. For the feed rate, the parameters are 0.1mm/rev, 0.15mm/rev and 0.2mm/rev. The third parameter that will be considered in this project is point of angle, and the parameters that will be used are about 110°, 120° and 135°. The machining processes were performed on the CNC milling machine. The surface roughness will be test by using Surfcom 130A. Results shows that, the best surface roughness were obtained at the lower cutting speed, middle of feed rate and middle of point of angle. So, the optimum cutting speed, feed rate and point of angle are, 15m/min, 0.15mm/rev and 120°. The confirmation results show that, the predicted values and the measured values are quite close to each other

Gender representation in different languages and grammatical marking on pronouns: when beauticians, musicians, and mechanics remain men

Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was used to examine the additional potential influence of pronouns. Across the three languages, pronouns differ in their grammatical gender marking: The English they is gender neutral, the French ils is masculine, and the German sie, although interpretable as generic, is morphologically feminine. Including a later pronominal reference to a group of people introduced by a plural role name significantly altered the masculine role name’s grammatical influence only in German, suggesting that grammatical cues that match (as in French) do not have a cumulative impact on the gender representation, whereas grammatical cues that mismatch (as in German) do counteract one another. These effects indicate that subtle morphological relations between forms actually used in a sentence and other forms have an immediate impact on language processing, although information about the other forms is not necessary for comprehension and may, in some cases, be detrimental to it

What do true gender ratios and stereotype norms really tell us?

We present a Focused Review on work that was conducted to compare perceived distributions of men and women in occupations and other social roles with actual real world distributions. In previous work, we showed that means for the two sources were similar and the correlation between them was high. However, in the present paper, although we argue that comparing subjective gender stereotype norms and real world data about gender ratios is an interesting endeavor, we also discuss the limits to and difficulties in trying to determine the causal relationship between them. Most crucially, we argue that our data does not allow us to deduce with certainty that subjective gender norms are based directly on gender ratios

Emotion inferencesduring reading comprehension: What evidence can the self-pace reading paradigm provide?

This paper provides an explanation for the non-specificity of emotion inferences found in previous research (e.g., Gygax, Garnham & Oakhill, 2004). We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers’ mental representations of the main character’s affective status. We also suggest that in a self-paced reading paradigm, when participants read sentences slower than others, it does not unequivocally provide insight into their mental representations of the text. We show that specific control conditions need to be implemented before such an assumption can be made in order to separate inference and representation processes from contextual integration processes

How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey.

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives - for example, rare or polyfunctional ones - might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

This paper investigated readers’ representations of the main protagonist’s emotional status in short narratives, as well as several mental factors that may affect these representations. General and visuo-spatial working memory, empathy and simulation were investigated as potential individual differences in generating emotional inferences. Participants were confronted with narratives conveying information about the protagonist’s emotional state. We manipulated each narrative’s target sentence according to its content (emotional label vs. description of the behavior associated to the emotion) and to its congruence to the story (matching vs. mismatching). The results showed that globally the difference between reading times of congruent and incongruent target sentences was bigger in the behavioral than in the emotional condition. This pattern was accentuated for high visuo-spatial working memory participants when they were asked to simulate the stories. These results support the idea that mental models may be of a perceptual nature and may more likely include behavioral elements than emotion labels per se, as suggested earlier by Gygax et al. (2007)

Individual Variations in the Mastery of Discourse Connectives from Teenage Years to Adulthood

Many connectives, such as therefore and however, are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level insertion task (N = 307, aged 12 to 64) and a text-level insertion task (N = 172, aged 13 to 71). Our results indicate that, despite a general progression in the level of competence with age, the academic level of participants is a strong predictor of competence within each age group, even during adulthood. In addition, from the age of 12, competence is related to the frequency of connectives in naturalistic data, with frequent connectives systematically mastered better than less frequent ones. Finally, in all age groups, the use and understanding of connectives is more challenging when sentences to complete are embedded within a richer context than when presented alone

Altering male-dominant representations:a study on nominalized adjectives and participles in first and second language German

The generic use of masculine plural forms in grammatical gender languages has been criticized for activating unequal gender representations that are male dominant. The present study examined whether the recently introduced gender-neutral forms of nominalized adjectives and participles in German provide references that induce more balanced representations. We used cross-linguistic differences as a means to illustrate the flexibility of the gender representation system and investigated both native and nonnative (French–German bilinguals) speakers of German. Although a masculine bias persisted when participants read role nouns in the masculine plural form, the study suggests that the usage of nominalized forms can attenuate this male bias, even for nonnative speakers. The results of the study provide further support for the use of gender-neutral language