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Cognitive demands of gender-neutral language : the new genderless pronoun in the Swedish language and its effect on reading speed and memory

The gender-neutral pronoun hen has been added to the Swedish language with the aim to reduce sexism in the language and make language more inclusive. An objection against the implementation of the word is that the word would be cumbersome to read and would take more cognitive capacity to process. The present study examined if that concern is warranted. 209 participants self-paced read five texts with three pronouns each. Participants were randomly distributed to conditions containing only hen, he/she, she, or he as pronouns. No difference was found between reading speed in the condition containing hen as a pronoun in comparison with the conditions using han, hon or han/hon. No overall difference in memory recall was found either. However, sexism was found to be a moderator for memory recall when reading a text including hen, leading to lower memory recall for individuals scoring high on modern sexism.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-122736
Date January 2015
CreatorsVergoossen, Hellen
PublisherStockholms universitet, Psykologiska institutionen
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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