Registered report protocol: Perceptual effects of Arabic grammatical gender on occupational expectations in a gamified speech production task

The default use of masculine morphology to refer to all genders in Arabic-speaking countries is largely unquestioned and widely accepted. However, research on masculine generic morphology in other gender-marked languages has shown that this can create an over-representation of men and a male-bias in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2023-10, Vol.18 (10), p.e0292936-e0292936
Main Authors: Soliman, Farida, Stockall, Linnaea, Sharma, Devyani
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Evaluation
Gender
Generic drugs
Grammar, Comparative and general
Grammaticality (Linguistics)
Medicine and Health Sciences
Methods
Nurses
People and Places
Registered Report Protocol
Research and Analysis Methods
Social Sciences
Speech production
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Summary:The default use of masculine morphology to refer to all genders in Arabic-speaking countries is largely unquestioned and widely accepted. However, research on masculine generic morphology in other gender-marked languages has shown that this can create an over-representation of men and a male-bias in perception. Given the extensive use of default masculine grammatical gender in the context of job recruitment, education, and formal communication where women are typically underrepresented and men overrepresented, this widely accepted notion needs to be investigated. The primary aim of this research is to understand how grammatical gender in Arabic mediates occupational expectations based on the language currently used in job recruitment in Arabic speaking countries. Specifically, the study explores how the use of default masculine grammatical gender can create a male-bias in perception. The secondary aim of this research is to test whether gender-inclusive language can reduce this male-bias in perception and instead increase the accessibility, activation, and retrieval of exemplars related to other gender minorities (i.e., reduce male-bias in perception). This is achieved through a novel prompted speech production experiment, based on an adaptation of the popular board game 'Taboo' where participants are asked to describe role nouns presented (e.g., doctor or nurse) in different language conditions.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0292936