gender neutrality

Gendered Language Word Perception: On the Primary Language Acquisition in Los Angeles Adolescents

Lily Eun, Maya Gibson-Ott, Desirae Barrios, Katherine Sandoval

The Theory of Language Relativity suggests that an individual’s primary language shapes their perceptions and worldviews. Our research dives into how a gendered language like Spanish can affect object perception. The research focused on Spanish-speaking university students in Southern California; through surveys and interviews, the research illustrates how native Spanish speakers will assign gender to English words. Our research also included monolingual English-speaking participants as ‘control’ participants and native English speakers who were also bilingual in Spanish; this allowed our researchers to examine the patterns between bilingual and monolingual participants. Our findings illustrate that native Spanish speakers will assign genders to English words based on their Spanish equivalents; these findings indicate that primary languages have a strong linguistic influence on an individual’s perception regardless of their environment’s language. Our results highlight the importance bilingual assessments could have in the educational field. Accurately gauging students’ true intellect and advocating for inclusive language practices in fundamental education will be beneficial for educators to better provide the necessary resources to aid in a bilingual child’s learning. Our study highlights the implications of cross-cultural communication and the necessity of a change of assessment to be more linguistically sensitive for bilingual students.

Background

The Theory of Language Relativity is crucial to better understand human behaviors and the impacts of these behaviors in the educational world. This theory, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, claims that the structure of an individual’s primary language changes their worldview and shapes their perceptions. This hypothesis indicates that language is not just a tool of communication but has a deeper connection to an individual’s cognitive processor. And because many individuals residing in Southern California spoke Spanish before they spoke English (Los Angeles Almanac), our research team wanted to explore how a gendered language, such as Spanish, could impact individuals’ perception of gender regarding ‘genderless’ objects. Would our participants inadvertently allot gender connotations even while speaking a genderless language—English? Our field of research has been explored by Meria Sera, a University of Minnesota professor, who found that Spanish—being a gendered language—does influence a Spanish-speaking individual’s perception (Sera 1994). Building on this, we sought to investigate whether Spanish speakers, when questioned in English about the gender of objects, would replicate Sera’s findings regardless that the questions would be in their secondary language. In the educational world, students, whose primary language is Spanish, are required to participate in all placement exams in English only. Our research aims to provide proof as to why having bilingual evaluations in fundamental grade levels is crucial to better evaluating a child’s perception of the world.

Methods

Our research observed and analyzed word choice and gender narratives. In order to expand on the implications of the process of gendering words, we surveyed over a hundred people, the majority of them being undergraduate college students. This survey showed the participants various words, for example, “dress” and asked them to determine if the word was feminine, masculine, or neither. We categorized our participants into different sections, group A who only spoke English, group B who spoke English and learned Spanish as a second language, and group C who spoke Spanish as their first language and English as their second language. Once our initial results were collected, any students interested in additional interviews were contacted a week later and they were asked to repeat the word categorization process. Our team identified any changes in answers and attempted to determine patterns in responses among Native Spanish speakers and English speakers. Furthermore, interviewees were asked to list synonyms or adjectives of a particular word, and we then had the participants categorize those words as being feminine, masculine, or neither. Our goal was to analyze whether or not the perceived gender of words consistently agreed with each other.

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Results

Figure 1: Spanish speakers’ perceived gender of the word “language”

Our results show that native Spanish speakers will indeed gender English words to match the gender of the Spanish counterparts. In our 19 responses from participants who were Native Spanish Speakers, 50% of the responses to the English words were perceived to be the same gender as the gender of the word translated into Spanish. For example, when we asked our participants to identify the gender of the English word “language,” 57.9% of native Spanish speakers identified the word as Masculine. The word “language” in Spanish translates to “el idioma,” which is masculine in gender. During our post-survey interviews, a participant discussed that it felt “more natural” to choose the respective genders, and it had not registered to them that their choices aligned with the gender of the Spanish counterpart until our follow-up interview. When we analyzed the Native English speakers who only spoke English, we found that the participants were comparatively more likely to neutralize the gender of the English words. However, Native English speakers who were conversationally fluent in Spanish showed the greatest percentage of neutralizing the gender of English words. When analyzing Native Spanish speakers and Native English speakers, our results concluded that the more fluent and culturally connected the speaker was to Spanish culture, the more likely they would be to gender English words that do not explicitly show natural gender. Additionally, in explaining why speakers both fluent in Spanish and English chose to neutralize the words, we predicted that someone’s linguistic patterns would be subconsciously integrated to match the American culture that they live and are exposed to on a daily basis.

Figure 2: Native English speakers’ perceived gender of the words “day” and “language”

Discussion

Figure 3: Rates of perceived gender in various words among native Spanish speakers

Figure 4: Rates of perceived gender in various words among native English speakers

The findings in our research show evidence as to why schools should offer bilingual evaluations to youth in the LA area instead of English. Our findings indicate that our native language affects how we think about and perceive the world. Because language alters our reality, we cannot accurately evaluate one’s intelligence level in a language separate from their native tongue. To do so is unfair and a poor representation of intellect. Such evaluations lack the ability to understand the students’ nuances of the world, and, as a result, often serve as an obstacle preventing students from pursuing a higher education. By offering bilingual evaluations to youth in the Los Angeles area we gain a more holistic view of the student’s true intelligence level; by offering these bilingual evaluations fundamental education will better provide educators with the resources they need to work alongside their bilingual students.

The implementation of our research on the gendering of words across English and Spanish may most notably have a distinguishable impact on educators and curriculum developers. Understanding how grammatical gender can influence perception and interpretation—in languages such as Spanish—can provide valuable perspective on cross-cultural communication and can foster greater empathy and inclusivity throughout foundational education discourses.

Language learners may also benefit from recognizing that the way they gender an object or word can be perceived as relating to an opposite gender when speaking in another language. Because language has a fundamental impact on perception, culture, and community, organizations may benefit from incorporating inclusive language and receiving input from individuals of different backgrounds.

References

Geeslin, K. L. (2018). The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition. Hoboken, Nj: Wiley Blackwell.

Hispanics/Latinos in Los Angeles County – By the Numbers. (n.d.). Retrieved February 16, 2024, from www.laalmanac.com website: https://www.laalmanac.com/population/po722.php#:~:text=3.6%20million

Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S. (2008). Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition. Language Learning, 58(3), 503–553. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00449.x

Nissen, U. K. (2002, June). Aspects of translating gender. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26402383_Aspects_of_translating_gender

Pérez-Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: what Spanish children tell us. Journal of Child Language, 18(3), 571–590. doi:10.1017/S0305000900011259

Sera, M. D., Berge, C. A., & del Castillo Pintado, J. (1994). Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers. Cognitive development, 9(3), 261-292.

bilingualism, gender neutrality, Gendered Language

They and Them: Gender Inclusivity Across Languages

Sociolinguistics

Alexander Gonzalez, Maeneka Grewal, Nico Hy, Zoe Perrin, Vivian San Gabriel

The relevance of gender-neutral language has surged due to growing acceptance towards nonbinary and gender non-conforming people as well as the dissolution of the gender binary. Through comparative analysis of native English and Spanish speakers, we investigated the impact of grammatical gender on the methods speakers employ to express gender neutrality. Since Spanish sentences require full gender and number agreement, expressing gender neutrality in Spanish presents more challenges than in English. We asked participants to describe images of individuals and observed that the English speakers used gender-neutral language at higher rates than the Spanish speakers did. Their methods differed as well. Spanish speakers were more likely to mix feminine or masculine forms, alongside neutral descriptions, which we interpreted as attempts to use gender-neutral language. We can infer that even when Spanish speakers are looking to express something gender-neutrally, they may be limited by the lack of gender-neutral lexical items that can be used throughout an entire utterance. Our experiment was limited to written responses and as a result may not be representative of these speakers’ language use overall. More experiments dealing with oral speech and analyses of other gendered languages would contribute to the knowledge and understanding of this field.

Introduction

The language of gender inclusivity is constantly shifting and becomes increasingly relevant as our understanding of gender changes and the voices of nonbinary individuals are amplified. The recent surge in nonbinary visibility has drawn attention to the grammar of gender-neutral pronouns, especially in languages that have grammatical gender marking. We wanted to explore how speakers navigate using gender identity-related pronouns and terms to express gender neutrality, particularly in English, a language that does not use grammatical gender, and Spanish, a language that does use grammatical gender.

In English, the pronoun “they” is often used as a gender-neutral pronoun. The Spanish equivalent would be the novel pronoun “elle/ellx.” However, Spanish’s grammatical gender makes this pronoun difficult to use in spontaneous speech. In Spanish, all nouns and everything associated with them must be modified to fit gender and number agreement, while in English, nothing needs to be modified in order to use “they” in a sentence.

Through this experiment, we were looking to explore how grammatical gender may impact the ways speakers’ expresses gender neutrality when referring to a subject. This experiment focused specifically on individuals’ use of pronouns and other gender markers in their writing. We collected responses from native English and Spanish speakers of varying gender identities, looking to highlight the different ways gender neutrality is encoded in languages with grammatical gender compared to languages without it. As English already possesses a gender-neutral pronoun and does not use gender agreement, we predicted that English speakers will be more likely to use gender-neutral terms than Spanish speakers.

Methods

To test out this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment using Google Forms surveys to track the usage of pronouns and gender marked words in English and Spanish written communication. We collected our data through 2 separate surveys, each written in English and Spanish respectively. Each survey contained the same 10 computer generated images of androgynous individuals paired with a prompt requesting that participants describe the individuals using full sentences. It was important for us to disclose that the individuals in the photos were computer generated so as to avoid participants manipulating answers due to fears of misgendering real people. It was also important that we asked participants to describe the people in full sentences to increase the likelihood of participants using pronouns and gender marked terms.

Figure 1: A computer-generated image of a person (from www.thispersondoesnotexist.com)

The methodology used in this experiment was inspired by a prior study done by Bradley, Salkind, Moore & Teitsort (2019) which examines English L1 cisgender subjects’ perception of singular “they” as a non-gendered pronoun. In this study, the researchers analyzed English recordings of participants’ verbal reactions to image stimuli. However, our experiment will be analyzing how gender neutrality is expressed in writing for both English and Spanish. We chose to analyze written communication because of possible difficulties in verbally expressing gender neutrality in Spanish due to the language’s grammatical gender. It was found in the study by Slemp (2020) that verbally expressing gender neutrality in Spanish takes conscious effort. This is not only because of Spanish’s grammatical gender agreement, but also because there is no verbal standard gender neutral morpheme. Slemp found that, in order to express gender neutrality, participants alternated between the morphemes -e and -x in written language as replacements for -a and -o. These findings guided our decision to analyze written language as opposed to verbal responses.

Results

We received 13 responses to our English survey, and since each responder was asked to describe 10 images, we received a total of 130 descriptions in English. We found that 51.5% of these descriptions used gender-neutral language. Examples of gender-neutral language found in our English speakers include the explicit use of the gender-neutral pronoun “they” in sentences like “they have dark colored eyes with crow’s feet,” as well as the total avoidance of pronouns in favor of gender-neutral terms like “person” in sentences like “this person has dimples.”

The remaining 48.5% of descriptions used gendered language, with 25.4% of the responses being feminine descriptions and 23.1% being masculine descriptions. Of our 13 responders, 10 people (76.9%) used a neutral description at least once, while 3 people (23.1%) did not use a neutral description at all, meaning that they gendered every single image.

Figure 2: Percentage of feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral descriptions used by English speakers, from a total of 130 descriptions.

We received 11 responses to our Spanish survey for a total of 110 descriptions. While the use of gender-neutral language was a majority in the English survey, only 21.8% of the Spanish descriptions used gender-neutral language, and 5 of these gender-neutral responses used feminine or masculine pronouns or adjectives combined with neutral descriptions. We interpreted these responses as attempts to use gender-neutral language. Other ways in which Spanish speakers expressed gender neutrality include the avoidance of pronouns similar to the avoidance practiced by English speakers, the use of question marks to signal uncertainty about gender, as in “el señor?” and the use of a dual marker “-o/a” for gender-neutral adjectives.

Within the remaining 78.2% of gendered descriptions, 40.9% were feminine and 37.3% were masculine. Of our 11 responders, 7 people (63.6%) used a neutral description at least once, while 4 people (36.4%) did not use neutral descriptions at all.

Figure 3: Percentage of feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral descriptions used by Spanish speakers, from a total of 110 descriptions. Five of the neutral responses combined feminine or masculine pronouns or adjectives with neutral descriptions.

Discussion and Conclusions

Our results show that our English-speaking participants used more gender-neutral language than our Spanish-speaking participants. We can most likely attribute this to the fact that using the pronoun “they” was the most common way English speakers chose to convey gender neutrality: as we hypothesized, it appears that the availability of the gender-neutral “they” is what allowed them to do so. Gender-neutral language also seems to be more easily accessible in English, as shown in the way some of the English speakers fluidly switched between the pronouns “he,” “she,” and “they,” both between and within sentences.

On the other hand, none of the Spanish speakers used the novel pronouns “elle/ellx,” which suggests that these pronouns are less widely accepted and less readily available than the English “they.” This highlights an obstacle to introducing a new pronoun into a language: it is not likely to be understood and used in casual language if it is not well-known by speakers. It is most likely because the Spanish speakers didn’t have this gender-neutral pronoun available that they used various other methods to convey gender neutrality, such as mixing the gender agreements of articles, adjectives, and nouns. Mixing masculine and feminine forms suggests that they were aiming to construct gender-neutral sentences using the resources available to them.

In both languages, there were speakers who avoided pronouns altogether and used the word “person” or “individual” instead of gendered terms like “man” or “woman.” Some speakers expressed uncertainty over their use of gendered language as well as the gender of the person in the image, either explicitly through words like “I think,” or implicitly through the use of question marks. These uncertainties suggest that participants would have been more confident if there were more gender-neutral options in circulation—not only existent, but well-known and commonly used, as to allow a mutual understanding of the word between both speaker and listener.

While our data was collected in the form of written responses and may not accurately reflect the use of gender-neutral language in English and Spanish speakers, especially because written language lacks the spontaneity of spoken language, our results suggest that English speakers use gender-neutral language at a higher rate than Spanish speakers do. We think it would be worthwhile to conduct a similar study with a focus on speech rather than writing, as it would not only allow more insight into the use of gender-neutral language in general, but also investigate the feasibility of introducing new phonemes into languages for the sake of gender inclusivity, such as the -x marker in “ellx.” Ultimately, though, we have reached a better understanding of the various ways speakers can incorporate gender-inclusive language in their casual speech.

Bibliography

Balhorn, M. (2004). The Rise of Epicene They. Journal of English Linguistics, 32(2), 79–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424204265824

Bradley, E. D., Salkind, J., Moore, A., & Teitsort, S. (2019). Singular ‘they’and novel pronouns: gender-neutral, nonbinary, or both?. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 4(1), 36-1. https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/PLSA/article/viewFile/4542/4148

Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological science, 18(3), 193–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01871.x

Schriefers, H., & Jescheniak, J. (1999). Representation and Processing of Grammatical Gender in Language Production: A Review. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 575-600.

Slemp, K. (2020). Latino, Latina, Latin@, Latine, and Latinx: Gender Inclusive Oral Expression in Spanish.

https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7297

English pronouns, gender, Gender inclusivity, gender neutrality, inclusive language, Spanish pronouns