Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

A growing body of research shows that readers/listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result, which is central in debates about gender-neutral language, has mostly been established using masculine generics: readers/listeners tend to interpret masculine forms as referring specifically to men, even when a generic interpretation is intended. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type of nouns: hybrid nouns with a generic interpretation. These nouns can refer to both male and female individuals but have a fixed grammatical gender, masculine or feminine, depending on the noun (e.g. un talent ‘a talent’ and une vedette ‘a star’). The availability of both gender values for hybrid nouns allows for a more direct and comprehensive test of the effect of grammatical gender than permitted by masculine generics. Overall, the paper replicates the finding that grammatical gender influences gender inferences, with masculine hybrid nouns being judged as more likely to refer to male individuals as compared to semantically similar feminine hybrid nouns. However, the results did not reveal a symmetric bias for feminine nouns, as these nouns did not favor female interpretations but were interpreted as gender-neutral. However this latter result should be interpreted with caution as it could be due to effects of gender stereotypes that were not controlled for in the two studies.