Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The use of gender-fair language is an important measure to boost gender equality. However, there is wide-spreadscepticism as to the usefulness of avoiding male bias in language, even in gendered languages. For instance, in German allnouns carry grammatical gender, and role names are considered generic, even when their gender is masculine. We used asentence-picture matching task to test whether male references in language induce gendered representations. After presentinga sentence with a role name, a picture of a person was shown. In 48 trials, the factors gender of the role name (masculinevs. feminine) and sex of the person in the picture (woman vs. man) were crossed. The results of 40 participants showed thatwomen after masculine referents were more readily accepted than men after feminine referents, but reaction times increased.Thus, readers interpret some masculine forms as generic, but only with considerable cognitive effort.