Gender-inclusive morphology in Spanish: learnability, processing costs, and use

Abstract In Spanish, the -e suffix as a gender-inclusive morpheme (e.g., elles son bonites ) has been proposed as an alternative to traditional - o to refer to mixed-gender groups. Limited studies on this innovation suggest that the computation of inclusive morphology might not incur high processing costs. However, it is unclear whether native speakers who have acquired the Spanish binary grammatical system before puberty effectively process noun-adjective gender agreement with said inclusive language morpheme. Thirty-seven native speakers of Spanish completed a self-paced reading task and a sociolinguistic questionnaire. The former task contained sentences with (1) a subject comprised of two stereotypically masculine names (e.g., Pedro) and two stereotypically feminine names (e.g., María), (2) the verb están , and (3) an adjective with the traditional -o suffix or the inclusive -e suffix, and the latter included questions about language use and beliefs. Results show that while -e was associated with longer processing time overall, participants who reported using inclusive language most frequently showed no difference in processing -o and -e. Additionally, questionnaire data show that participant beliefs about learnability and usability of inclusive language mirror experimental findings. These results suggest that it is possible to acquire the - e morpheme in the L1 after puberty, with beliefs influencing the processing of these forms. Furthermore, the results highlight the roles of use of and exposure to inclusive gender in the language in order for speakers to acquire and process it.