Whats So Sexy About Degenderizing Language? Investigating Gender Representations by Readers and Listeners in Norwegian, Finnish and French, 2018

When referring to a person's personal, social or professional role, such as "researcher", "traveler" or "leader", knowing the person's biological gender will not always be crucial to understanding the content of a discourse. Previous research suggests that readers and listeners still make a gender assumption, and often do so in ways that unnecessarily narrow their understanding (mental picture) down to just one gender. In order to avoid gender-differentiated language and thus skew gender representations, Norway has proposed as a linguistic strategy «off-gender by neutralization». This strategy is to use words that do not specify gender when referring to women or men, avoiding e.g. use of feminine suffixes. What remains to be investigated, however, is the effect of removing linguistic allusions to gender on how gender is then interpreted. This project investigates this issue by conducting experimental research in three different languages that encode gender information to different degrees (Finnish, Norwegian and French) and in two modalities of language understanding (reading and listening).

当指代个体的个人、社会或职业角色时，例如「研究员」「旅行者」或「领导者」，知晓该个体的生理性别，并非始终是理解话语内容的必要前提。过往研究表明，读者与听众仍会对角色的性别作出预设，且这类预设往往会不必要地将其认知（心理意象(mental picture)）局限于单一性别范畴。为规避性别差异化语言、避免扭曲性别表征，挪威提出了「去性别化中立策略（off-gender by neutralization）」这一语言策略。该策略要求在指代男性或女性时，使用不明确标注性别的词汇，例如避免使用女性词缀。然而，移除话语中的性别指代会对性别解读方式产生何种影响，这一问题仍有待探究。本项目通过在三种性别信息编码程度各异的语言（芬兰语(Finnish)、挪威语(Norwegian)及法语(French)）中开展实验研究，并覆盖语言理解的两种模态（阅读(reading)与聆听(listening)），对该问题展开探究。