The interpretation of the -ə suffix as representative of the non-binary population in Italian

Abstract

Grammatical gender binarism in Italian has been recently challenged by a multitude of degendering strategies put forward as a response to the ceaseless reshaping of gender identity - a phenomenon whose magnitude demands full recognition at the level of language. Among the proposals are morphological innovations, of which the semivowel [-ə] appears to be the most widespread due to its seemingly superior accessibility when compared to the orthographic-marker counterparts. To test whether this non-binary morphological variant manages to immediately refer to a person who does not identify with the binary distinction of gender (singular condition) and to mixed, non-uniform gendered groups (plural condition), we designed a follow-up study to Bradley et al. (2019) using a sentence-picture matching task developed ad hoc. Reaction times and accuracy were measured by means of Gorilla. We predict that new morphological forms carry higher processing costs reflected in longer reaction times and that they can be easily linked to referents with no prevailing gender. The proposed analysis is manifold: (i) it sets out to establish whether adopting the non-binary morphological variant (-ə) results in the activation of an unspecified- or ambiguous-gender referent; (ii) whether the comprehension of sentences including such a variant implies higher processing costs; (iii) whether the dual meaning of the masculine form (specific vs generic) triggers more frequently the specific interpretation.