(Non-)gendered reference to occupations in Hexagonal French: a speech elicitation task
Célia Richy, Farida Soliman & Chloé Vincent (Queen Mary University of London & Ghent University)
This paper contributes to work on grammatical gender (g-gender) in reference to humans, examining the production of gendered and non-gendered noun phrases in Hexagonal French in the context of a speech elicitation experiment.
Work on g-gender processing shows a general influence from gender markers onto the inference of the referent’s gender. Specifically, research in psycholinguistics shows that masculine g-gender triggers a male bias in perception (e.g., Gygax and Gabriel 2008, Gygax et al. 2019). These findings challenge the belief that masculine g-gender bears a generic referential function. That is, it cannot effectively be used to refer to a mixed group or an individual whose gender is irrelevant, because it tends to lead to a male mental representation. This gave rise to studies on, and recommendations for, gender-fair language (GFL) in French and other languages (e.g., Sczesny et al. 2015, Vervecken et al. 2015, Burnett & Pozniak 2021, Kim et al. 2023, also HCE 2022). In spoken French, strategies include the use of double forms (e.g., les actrices et les acteurs ‘the actresses and the actors’) or plural common gender forms (e.g., les photographes ‘the photographers’), which efficiently reduce male bias (Tibblin et al. 2023, Xiao et al. 2023, Pozniak et al. 2023).
Given the increase of GFL in the public domain (Simon and Vanhal 2022), this study examines the strategies used by native speakers of Hexagonal French to describe occupations in generic contexts. In particular, it tests time-constrained speech production, rather than in written French, in the context of ongoing changing attitudes and exposure towards GFL. This online experiment constitutes the groundwork for further investigation for this type of speech production.
Because masculine g-gender triggers a male mental representation, twelve common gender nouns were chosen from Misersky et al. (2014) norming study for roles and occupations. Stimuli are balanced for stereotypicality (masculine, feminine, neutral) and displayed as bare nouns on virtual flashcards. The absence of gender marking on nouns leaves the opportunity for speakers to produce gendered or non-gendered forms. This is because common gender both takes out the inherent masculine gender bias and avoids potential gender agreement between the stimuli and participants’ productions.
Participants have twenty seconds to read each flashcard and describe the occupations displayed. Productions are coded as gendered or non-gendered. After the speech elicitation phase, participants fill in a basic demographic questionnaire, a questionnaire on ambivalent sexism and a questionnaire measuring attitude and exposure towards GFL.
We predict an effect of stereotypicality so that stereotypically masculine nouns trigger more masculine g-gender productions and stereotypically feminine nouns trigger more feminine g-gender productions. In addition, we predict that speakers who have positive attitudes towards GDL and have higher exposure to it tend to avoid gendered references (Sczesny et al. 2015). Yet, we predict that having non-sexist views is not a sufficient condition to produce non gendered forms, to the extent that masculine generics remained the default strategy until recently.
References
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