I wasted a bit of time at the beginning worrying about the fact that there was nowhere to specify that I can read a (little!) bit of German, having studied it for a couple of years, and that I know some German people and am thus familiar with some German names, but in the end it wasn't relevant.
Took it! I missed an option for "no clue whatsoever", though, because I have never heard of the name Bente, and have no possible frame of reference. (Birte?)
Yeah, I had debated if I should add a "don't know" option. However, I decided against it for the following reason. The experiment that I had people do in our lab includes sentences in which the subject is a first name. Later in the sentence, participants read a pronoun. So in that situation, my participants also had to come up with some sort of mental idea (based on world knowledge, phonology, who knows?) of which gender this name belongs to. So I tried to mimic this experience as much as possible for you guys.
Yeah, I had debated if I should add a "don't know" option. However, I decided against it for the following reason. The experiment that I had people do in our lab includes sentences in which the subject is a first name. Later in the sentence, participants read a pronoun. So in that situation, my participants also had to come up with some sort of mental idea (based on world knowledge, phonology, who knows?) of which gender this name belongs to. So I tried to mimic this experience as much as possible for you guys.
Yeah, it was actually quite hard to find (German) names that are not gender-specific. Basically, when you google "German gender-neutral names", you'll find a lot of websites that simply advise against using them because city hall will probably require the kid to have a gender-specific middle name. So yeah, the vast majority of German names is actually very specific.
I've always found it intriguing that a country which is so socially progressive in some respects basically forbids the use of gender-neutral given names.
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I wasted a bit of time at the beginning worrying about the fact that there was nowhere to specify that I can read a (little!) bit of German, having studied it for a couple of years, and that I know some German people and am thus familiar with some German names, but in the end it wasn't relevant.
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And that's good to know, I guess I could just add a comment field for cases like that.
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The experiment that I had people do in our lab includes sentences in which the subject is a first name. Later in the sentence, participants read a pronoun. So in that situation, my participants also had to come up with some sort of mental idea (based on world knowledge, phonology, who knows?) of which gender this name belongs to. So I tried to mimic this experience as much as possible for you guys.
Thanks a lot for your participation! :)
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The experiment that I had people do in our lab includes sentences in which the subject is a first name. Later in the sentence, participants read a pronoun. So in that situation, my participants also had to come up with some sort of mental idea (based on world knowledge, phonology, who knows?) of which gender this name belongs to. So I tried to mimic this experience as much as possible for you guys.
Thanks a lot for your participation! :)
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Yeah, it was actually quite hard to find (German) names that are not gender-specific. Basically, when you google "German gender-neutral names", you'll find a lot of websites that simply advise against using them because city hall will probably require the kid to have a gender-specific middle name.
So yeah, the vast majority of German names is actually very specific.
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