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

Abstract

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.,doctorornurse) in different language conditions.