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Vortrag: A star amongst gender-fair forms?

The influence of the non-binary asterisk on gendered representations of persons

Non-binary gender forms (GFs) intend to allow mental representations of people with a gender identity outside the binary system. However, quantitative research on non-binary GFs in Ger- man is rare. Our goal is to test associations of readers when being presented with non-binary GFs using an asterisk (e.g. Lehrer*in – teacher).

Previous research suggests sentence-picture matching tasks to be a useful method to test mental representations in readers. (cf. Stanfield and Zwaan 2001, Zwaan et al. 2002) Within the debate on the interpretation of the generic masculine in German, Irmen and Köhncke (1996) use a sentence-picture matching task to test which mental representations are induced by the generic masculine person referent. Participants show longer reaction times (RTs) when a masculine form is matched with a picture of a female person; moreover, acceptance rates are lower than when the masculine form is followed by a picture of a person exhibiting masculine character- istics. Their results are in line with those presented later by Ferstl and Dietsche (2016) using a similar task. Both studies suggest difficulties in interpreting women referred to by a masculine noun and thus that the generic interpretation of the masculine in German is not automatic.

In order to test which mental representations are induced by non-binary GFs using an asterisk, we have developed a word-picture-matching task. Probands are presented with singular role nouns in either masculine, feminine or non-binary GF followed by a picture of a person in this role exhibiting either male, female or ambiguous characteristics. They have to decide intuitively whether the image matches the foregoing word. Words instead of sentences are used as stimuli in order to avoid influences of, e.g., definiteness and numerus on the degree of referentiality. (cf. Kotthoff and Nübling 2018, p. 92ff) We hypothesise that, if non-binary GFs work as in- tended, word forms will have a significant effect on RTs as well as acceptance rates as sug- gested by previous research. In particular, we expect shorter RTs in response to ambiguous pictures as well as higher acceptance rates when preceded by a non-binary GF using an asterisk. Data collection is now in progress. Background, methods, and first results shall be discussed.

References

Ferstl. E. und Dietsche, L. (2016): „Is gender-fair language needed? How grammatical gender influences repre- sentations of discourse referents“ in: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, 3706.
Irmen, L. & Köhncke, A. (1996): „Zur Psychologie des ‚generischen‘ Maskulinums“ in: Sprache & Kognition: Zeitschrift für Sprache- und Kognitionspsychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 152-188.
Kotthoff, H. & Nübling, D. (2018): Genderlinguistik. Eine Einführung in Sprache, Gespräch und Geschlecht, Tübingen: Narr.
Stanfield, A. and Zwaan, R.A. (2001): „The Effect of Implied Orientation Derived from Verbal Context on Picture Recognition“ in: Psychological Science, Volume 12, Number 2, pp. 153-156.
Zwaan, R.A. et al. (2002): „Language Comprehenders Mentally Represent the Shapes of Objects“ in: Psycholog- ical Science, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 168-171.

Info

Tag: 25.09.2021
Anfangszeit: 13:30
Dauer: 00:40
Raum: Don Giovanni

Sprache: en

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