Gender diversity and linguistic variation in American Spanish

processing gender stereotypes and morphology in Argentina and Chile

Abstract

Recently, the use of gender-inclusive language variants has spread considerably in Spanish-speaking communities. However, few studies analyze the spontaneous uses and processing of these forms and even fewer studies focus on the varieties of Spanish spoken in Latin America. There are also few studies in Spanish that analyze the complex relationships between stereotypes and gender morphology. In this article, we present a task to evaluate the processing of the non-binary morphological innovation [-e] in two linguistic communities (Argentina and Chile). For this purpose, we consider two independent variables (stereotypicality bias and gender morphology) in the comprehension of sentences presenting role nouns with masculine and feminine stereotypicality. We analyzed three dependent variables: noun phrase (determiner + role noun) reading time, spillover word reading time and total sentence reading time. We found different patterns of performance among the different linguistic communities and the dependent variables analyzed. On the one hand, the differences in the two population groups highlight the importance of analyzing dialectal variation in psycholinguistic studies. On the other hand, the different reading patterns among the dependent variables could be explained by different underlying processes: lexical semantics or semantic integration at the sentence level. Moreover, the non-binary form [-e] seemed to function as generic and not to hinder language processing in Spanish speakers from Argentina and Chile.