Una re-revisión del masculino genérico en español en respuesta a Heap (2024)

The presence of linguistic expressions of gender-fair language has experienced a steady increase in recent decades. Both in generalist and specialized media, the debate on the relevance of these proposals and their capacity to produce social change has given rise to a fruitful production of mostly descriptive and normative studies. Empirical research has been less prevalent in this field. Based on the systematic review presented by Heap (2024), this paper analyzes experimental designs aimed at capturing speakers’ interpretations of the so-called generic masculine in Spanish. Both the internal validity of the studies, determining whether the test stimuli represent adequate examples of generic masculine, and their external validity, based on the analysis of the composition and size of the selected population samples, are evaluated. The results identify several methodological limitations and indicate possible ways to overcome them in future research.