Gender asterisks: Less comprehensible in the singular than in the plural? Experiments show different effects

Are texts with gender asterisks less comprehensible? Does it make a difference whether this gender-inclusive language is used in the singular or the plural? The Institute of Educational Psychology at Technische Universität Braunschweig investigated this in two experiments. The results have now been published in the current issue of the journal ‘Discourse Processes’.

Dr. Marcus Friedrich from the Institute of Educational Psychology. Photo credits: Markus Hörster/TU Braunschweig

According to Dr. Marcus Friedrich from the Institute of Educational Psychology, the study is the first to compare the comprehensibility of gender-inclusive language in the singular and plural. The reason for the new experiments was an earlier study that had produced ambiguous results: in the first experiment, the gender asterisk did not affect comprehensibility, but in the second it did. “At the time, we suspected that this was because the gender asterisk was used mainly in its plural form in the first experiment and mainly in its much more complicated singular form in the second,” says the scientist. “However, as the experiments used different texts, this assumption was not certain.”

Comparison of plural and singular gender asterisks

In their new study, the researchers led by Dr. Marcus Friedrich therefore specifically compared the gender asterisk in the plural with the gender asterisk in the singular. The 133 or 110 test subjects, most of whom were students, were randomly presented with one of three versions of a text. This was either a text with only masculine forms (e.g. “der Spieler” (the player)), a version with the gender asterisk in the plural (“die Spieler*innen” (the players)) or a version with the gender asterisk in the singular („der*die Spieler*in“ (the player)). After reading the text, all subjects completed a questionnaire on comprehensibility.

Further study with non-academics planned

Both experiments showed that the gender asterisk in the singular significantly reduced comprehensibility. In the plural, this was only the case in the first experiment. This means that there are now a total of four experiments indicating that the gender asterisk in the singular reduces comprehensibility. Of the three experiments that looked at the plural, one showed an impairment and two did not. “Further studies are therefore needed, especially with people with lower reading skills than students, i.e. non-academics, school pupils and people learning German as a second language,” says Dr. Marcus Friedrich.

The researcher points out another peculiarity: “In these experiments, we gendered many passages. A study by Carolin Müller-Spitzer suggests that in a typical German text, only about one per cent of all passages need to be gendered. In the two experiments, five and 15 per cent of all passages were manipulated.” The effects should therefore be smaller in texts with fewer gender asterisks. However, this needs to be tested in further studies. In addition, it should be investigated for the gender asterisk whether comprehensibility in the singular is less affected when the article is abbreviated, e.g. “d. Spieler*in” (the player).