Inclusive Language in Italian. An Experimental Investigation of the -ə Suffix

Many morphological innovations have been proposed to expand the boundaries of gender binarism in Italian. To test the interpretation of -ə we designed an experiment adapting the sentence-picture matching task used by Bradley et al. (2019) for English. The study sets out to establish whether (i) the adoption of -ə entails activation of a nonbinary referent (or group) or a mixed-gender group; (ii) the comprehension of sentences containing -ə requires higher processing costs, by looking at participants’ response times; (iii) the masculine form triggers the specific interpretation more frequently. To disentangle the contribution of linguistic processing from potential visual interference, a follow-up study was later conducted without images.