Hlavní řešitel: Jan Chromý

Abstrakt: The project investigates the use and processing of generic masculine role nouns in Czech, focusing on their ambiguity and susceptibility to male bias. Adopting an uncertainty reduction perspective, we examine factors influencing their interpretation, including pragmatic, personal, and socio-cultural ones. This project fills a significant knowledge gap by addressing the lack of studies on the processing of generic masculine forms in highly inflectional languages like Czech. The project comprises three work packages: (1) collecting new gender perception norms for Czech and other languages, (2) conducting a corpus analysis of generic masculine usage in Czech, and (3) running behavioral and neurolinguistic experiments on their processing, which will examine both linguistic factors (e.g., syntactic role, semantics, frequency) and interpersonal ones (e.g., education, gender, age). The findings will advance our understanding of gender representation in language, contribute to theoretical models of ambiguity resolution, and inform discussions on inclusive language.