[SynSem] Francesca Foppolo (Milan-Bicocca)

retour Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique

Francesca Foppolo (Milan-Bicocca) 

Efficacy and feasibility of Italian gender inclusive language: an eye-tracking study

In languages with a rich inflectional paradigm, such as Italian, role nouns, as well as other phrasal elements (articles, verbs, adjectives) can convey morphosyntactic information referring to the gender of the referent (il maestro = male teacher; la maestra = female teacher; l'insegnante = male/female teacher).

To make the language more inclusive and overcome the binary system, a recent proposal involves the adoption of the schwa (ə) as a gender-neutral morphosyntactic morpheme (lə maestrə, lə insegnante). To date, no experimental study has tested the feasibility and effectiveness of this inclusive/neutral form in reducing the perception of gender bias, i.e. the activation of gender stereotypes that are automatically integrated during linguistic processing. To fill this gap, we will present some experimental studies that test, by recording explicit and implicit measures, the acceptability and online processing of sentences containing the schwa (ə), discussing the results in light of the recent debate on gender-inclusive language.