Processing the Gender Star Form in German: A Comparison of Written and Spoken Modalities

The German gender star is a form of gender inclusive language that uses an asterisk to merge masculine and feminine role noun endings (e.g., Choreograf*in, ‘ choreographer inclusive ’). It was created to counter the male bias of masculine forms intended as generic and to represent all genders more inclusively. This study examined how role nouns with the gender star are processed in written and spoken German using a semantic priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, German participants were primed with masculine 1 ( Choreograf ), feminine ( Choreografin ), and star noun forms ( Choreograf*in ) in printed form, before identifying the gender of a following pronoun as feminine ( sie, ‘ she’) or masculine ( er, ‘ he’). Experiment 2 presented the same prime forms auditorily with the star form realized as a glottal stop ( Choreografʔin ), produced by either a conventionally feminine-sounding or masculine-sounding voice. Congruency between prime and target gender for masculine noun forms ( Choreograf–er ) facilitated response times in both experiments and for feminine noun forms ( Choreografin–sie ) in Experiment 2. Response times for the masculine and feminine pronouns following the inclusive prime forms did not differ significantly in either experiment, indicating that these forms can be associated with both female and male referents in reading and listening, with the gender of the voice having no further effect on processing.