Cognitive representation of gender typicality and its effects on linguistic processing The present research includes a series of studies which investigate the effects of cognitive representation of gender roles on reading comprehension processes. The work tests a description based anaphor resolution paradigm which replaces classical role noun antecedents through role descriptions not containing any grammatical gender cue to the referent gender. This solution allows a cross linguistic comparison between a grammatical gender language (German) and a natural gender language (English). Moreover the research analyzes the impact of gender representations on thematic role assignment during sentence reading. The research employs the eye tracking methodology to document the time course of gender typicality stereotype activation and its effect on anaphor resolution processes.