(Non-)Gendered Reference To Occupations In Quebec French

This study replicates an experiment originally conducted on Hexagonal French, now targeting Québec French. It is part of a larger project, which contributes to work on grammatical gender (g-gender) in reference to humans and aiming to track social and linguistic change (i.e., to what extent gender-fair language strategies are intuitively used). This experiment examines the production of gendered and non-gendered noun phrases in Québec French in the context of a speech elicitation experiment. Work on g-gender processing shows a general influence from gender markers onto the inference of the referent’s gender. Specifically, research in psycholinguistics shows that masculine g-gender triggers a male bias in perception (e.g., Gygax and Gabriel 2008, Gygax et al. 2019). These findings challenge the belief that masculine g-gender bears a generic referential function. That is, it cannot effectively be used to refer to a mixed group or an individual whose gender is irrelevant, because it tends to lead to a male mental representation. This gave rise to studies on, and recommendations for, gender-fair language (GFL) in French and other languages (e.g., Sczesny et al. 2015, Vervecken et al. 2015, Burnett & Pozniak 2021, Kim et al. 2023, also HCE 2022). In spoken French, strategies include the use of double forms (e.g., les actrices et les acteurs ‘the actresses and the actors’) or plural common gender forms (e.g., les photographes ‘the photographers’) among others, which can reduce male bias (Tibblin et al. 2023, Xiao et al. 2023, Pozniak et al. 2023). This study examines the strategies used by native speakers of Québec French to describe occupations in generic contexts. In particular, it tests time-constrained speech production, rather than in written French. Since in Québec, gender-fair language policies, and particularly the feminisation of titles, have been in place since the 1970s, this online experiment investigates the extent to which these strategies are available to Québec French speakers in spontaneous speech, compared to Hexagonal French speakers. This study addresses the following research questions: R1. What are the strategies used by native speakers of Québec French to describe occupations in generic contexts? R2. Does stereotypicality influence the strategies used? R3. Does attitudes towards and exposure to GFL moderate the effect on the type of strategy used? R4. Do Québec French speakers, overall, make more frequent use of gender-fair strategies, compared to Hexagonal French speakers?