DISABILITY OR FEMININITY? THE ROLE OF DISABILITY FACTOR AND SEX FACTOR IN BUILDING MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF A COMPOUND SOCIAL CATEGORY
NAWOJA MIKOŁAJCZAK-MATYJA *
Faculty of Modern Languages and Literature, Institute of Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Al. Niepodległości 4, 61-874 Poznan, Poland
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The paper makes a contribution to the problem of the role of disability as a factor building mental representations of social categories determined by more than one distinctive factor. It attempts to verify the assumption that non-individual mental representation of a category determined by both disability and female sex is more consistent with representation of the simple category determined by the disability factor than with representation of the category determined only by the sex factor. 6 groups of native users of Polish, secondary schools students, generated verbal associations to the three stimuli: WOMAN, INVALID, INVALID WOMAN or assessed the stimuli by placing them on 40 bipolar scales. Similarities noted between the categories INVALID WOMAN and INVALID were significantly stronger than the ones between the categories INVALID WOMAN and WOMAN in all aspects of the associative test results (as grammatical characteristics of reactions sets, number of associations identical for two stimuli, similarity of facets of two representations) as well as in the results of statistical analysis of differences in the test of scales. The results are considered in terms of the structure of semantic memory and mental lexicon.
Keywords: Semantic memory, mental lexicon, concept, compound category, disability, disabled woman