Inclusive Language in Italian
An Experimental Investigation of the -ə Suffix
open access | peer reviewed
- Federica Marenghi - Università Ca' Foscari Venezia - email
- Anna Cardinaletti - Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia - email orcid profile
- Alice Suozzi - Università Ca' Foscari Venezia - email
Abstract
Many morphological innovations have been proposed to expand the boundaries of gender binarism in Italian. To test the interpretation of -ə we designed an experiment adapting the sentence-picture matching task used by Bradley, Salkind, Moore, and Teitsort in 2019 for English. The study sets out to establish whether (i) the adoption of -ə entails activation of a nonbinary referent (or group) or a mixed-gender group; (ii) the comprehension of sentences containing -ə requires higher processing costs, by looking at participants’ response times; (iii) the masculine form triggers the specific interpretation more frequently. To disentangle the contribution of linguistic processing from potential visual interference, a follow-up study was later conducted without images.
Keywords Italian • Grammatical gender • Degendering and regendering strategies • Inclusive language • Neomorpheme -ə
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/979-12-5742-035-2 | e-ISBN 979-12-5742-035-2 | Published March 6, 2026 | Accepted Jan. 13, 2026 | Submitted Sept. 15, 2025 | Language en
Copyright © 2026 Federica Marenghi, Anna Cardinaletti, Alice Suozzi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.