In English, a natural gender language (Gygax et al., 2019), most personal nouns are gender neutral. In contrast, in German, a grammatical gender language, all nouns carry grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Dependent forms, such as articles and pronouns, have to correspond. For the majority of role nouns, there are two forms: a masculine (e.g., der Radfahrer – the (male) cyclist [masc.]) and a feminine form. The latter is usually derived from the former by adding the feminine suffices -in [sing.] or -innen [plural] (e.g., die Radfahrerin – the female cyclist [fem.]) (Diewald & Steinhauer, 2017). As illustrated by the example above, feminine and masculine forms are used asymmetrically: Feminine forms only refer to women, while masculine forms can be used to refer to men (specific use) and to referents whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (generic use)²2

We will focus on the generic use of masculine role nouns and gender-fair alternatives intended to replace these. The search for gender-fair pronouns is beyond the scope of the study. The most prominent gender-fair pronouns are the singular they in English, e.g., Bradley (2020), and hen in Swedish, e.g., Renström et al. (2022). For German, there is no consensus on a gender-fair pronoun yet, see, e.g., Löhr (2022).

Two strategies of gender-fair language (GFL) can be distinguished (cf. Gabriel et al., 2018): Feminization makes the inclusion of women explicit (e.g., binary pair forms: die Studentin oder der Student – the female student [fem.] or the male student [masc.], or their abbreviations, e.g., the capital-I: FlugbegleiterIn – stewardEss). Neutralizations remove any clues to the referent’s gender (e.g., nominalized participles: Studierende – those who study).

With the growing acknowledgement of the existence of gender identities beyond a female-male dichotomy, additional non-binary gender forms (GFs) have been introduced. They are intended to refer to all genders (Diewald & Steinhauer, 2017). The most popular non-binary GF and the one central to the public debate (Krome, 2020; Meuleneers, 2024) is the gender star. It has gained popularity particularly since 2018, when a third gender option (diverse) was introduced into the German personal status law in addition to the existing binary options (female and male). It is created by adding an asterisk between a role noun’s stem and its feminine suffix (e.g., Radfahrer*in – cyclist). It intends to go beyond being a mere abbreviation for binary pair forms, such as capital-I forms, to also address persons identifying as non-binary. Recent psycholinguistic studies investigating the functionality of the star form showed that its use can successfully reduce the male bias evoked by masculine generics (e.g., Keith et al., 2022; Körner et al., 2022). One study moreover showed that it evokes well-balanced mental representations of all genders (Zacharski & Ferstl, 2023).

Grammatical gender is not the only relevant factor influencing gendered representations of person referents in German: Many role nouns are associated with semantic gender stereotypes encoding the readers’ expectations of how likely it is that the referent is female or male (e.g., female: social workers, male: surgeons). This information from general world knowledge, which is related to the actual binary gender distribution within a specific group, might be altered when there is societal change (cf. Zacharski & Ferstl, 2023). Given that previous research has shown interactions between grammatical gender and stereotypical gender in German (e.g., Braun et al., 1998; Sato et al., 2016; Vervecken et al., 2013), it is crucial to take gender stereotypes into account when conducting research on GFL.

In order to build an appropriate mental representation in the first place, gender-fair alternatives have to be readable and comprehensible (Friedrich & Heise, 2019). While opponents of GFL have argued that use of binary pair forms and neutralizations that are in line with German orthography (in the following: orthographic forms) makes texts harder to read and understand (e.g., Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, 2020), experimental studies using self-report measures have not confirmed this claim (e.g., Blake & Klimmt, 2010; Friedrich & Heise, 2019; Pöschko & Prieler, 2018). Using eye-tracking, Steiger-Loerbroks and Von Stockhausen (2014) moreover found that gender-fair neutralizations required more processing effort than masculine forms only at early reading stages, but not at later ones.

The case is different for binary forms that are not in line with German orthography (in the following: non-orthographic forms): Pöschko and Prieler (2018) found significantly lower subjective readability ratings for texts using slash forms (e.g., der/die Lehrer/in – the [masc.]/the [fem.] male teacher [masc.]/female teacher [fem. suffix]). For texts using capital-I forms (e.g., FlugbegleiterIn – stewardEss), Blake and Klimmt (2010) reported longer total reading times than for texts using orthographic forms (masculine forms, pair forms, and neutralizations). The authors suggested that this might be due to the more complex and unusual shape as well as the rare occurrence of the former. Another open question is whether, as seems likely, frequent exposure to non-orthographic forms can reduce these processing difficulties (cf. Gabriel et al., 2018).

So far, only Friedrich et al. (2021) have investigated the readability of the star form using subjective comprehensibility ratings: In two different experiments, students were presented with texts in one of two variants (masculine/star). The text for the first experiment contained predominantly plural star forms (e.g., die Spieler*innen – the players), while the second text contained more singular star forms. For the first experiment, the ratings did not yield any difficulties for the star. However, in the second experiment, it significantly decreased comprehensibility, particularly due to increased sentence difficulty ratings. Interpreting these results, it should be noted that there is only one definite plural article in German (die), which is used for feminine and masculine nouns. Hence, no adaptation of dependent articles is necessary when using plural star forms. In contrast, using singular star forms requires a more complex and very salient adaptation of the article (e.g., der*die Spieler*in – the[masc.]*the[fem.] player[star])—the actual use of these more complex constructions is, however, very uncommon.

This study provided valuable first insights in the readability of the star, but has two limitations: First, its results are based on subjective ratings of participants. Hence, it cannot be ruled out that responses were influenced by factors such as social desirability, political correctness, or emotions towards GFL. In contrast, implicit measures enable investigation of word recognition at its earliest, pre-conscious stages³3

Neuropsychological methods such as EEG and ERPs allow the investigation of the early stages of visual word recognition. Research on the exact time course of the retrieval of lexical and semantic information is, however, inconsistent: While many studies suggest that lexico-semantic processing takes place between 200–600ms (e.g., Grainger & Holcomb, 2009), some studies showed that competent readers retrieve lexical and semantic information already within 200ms after word onset (e.g., Hauk et al., 2012).

If we want to know whether the gender star makes reading a text more difficult, investigating how it affects the recognition of role nouns on the word level is a crucial step towards it. According to van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), text comprehension consists of building a mental representation of what the text is about. The comprehension processes that contribute to its production occur at the word, sentence, and text level and interact with the reader’s world knowledge (Perfetti et al., 2005). Hence, “if we knew how people recognize whole words on the page, we [would] […] know part of what we need to know in order to understand how people comprehend whole printed sentences” (Coltheart, 2006, p. 6). Reflecting this, when investigating the readability of the star, Friedrich et al. (2021) did not only ask participants to rate the comprehensibility of the text as a whole, but moreover assessed word difficulty, that is, how easily participants grasped the meanings of the text’s words.

A well-established implicit measure to study word recognition is the lexical decision task (Coltheart et al., 2001; Rastle, 2016). In this paradigm, participants are presented with strings of letters. They have to decide as quickly as possible whether the stimulus shown is a word or not. Accuracy rates and reaction times (RTs) provide information on which factors influence the ease of word recognition. The most important lexical features are word length and word frequency: Shorter or more frequent words are recognized more quickly. Other factors include age of acquisition and familiarity: Words that are learned earlier in life and words that are more familiar are recognized faster (Coltheart et al., 2001; Rastle, 2016). Importantly, the paradigm even enables the detection of effects of within-word changes on word identification that are small in magnitude (e.g., case alternation: gArDeNeR, Coltheart & Freeman, 1974).

The Dual Route Cascaded model of visual word recognition (Coltheart et al., 2001) assumes that each word known by the reader is represented as an individual lexical entry in a mental lexicon. Words are recognized by mapping the identified letters on the correct entry (lexical access). This process allows the skilled reader to quickly and accurately read familiar words. Reading unknown words or pronounceable strings of letters (pseudowords), in contrast, requires the use of the non-lexical route (corresponding to spelling out the word) which is slower and less accurate.

For reading star nouns, there are two potential scenarios: First, owing to their non-orthographic form, they are not mapped on entries of the mental lexicon, but are processed via the non-lexical route. Second, star nouns are accessed via the lexical route, which is highly sensitive to word length, word frequency, and age of acquisition. Due to the insertion of the asterisk, star nouns are longer. Moreover, special character forms occur less frequently than feminine forms (Goldhahn et al., 2012), which are less frequent than masculine words (cf. Friedrich et al., 2021; Gabriel et al., 2018). Finally, owing to its relative recent introduction, participants will have first learnt the star form in adulthood, so that age of acquisition is higher for star nouns than for binary forms. Hence, in both scenarios, we expect slower reading times for star nouns. Interindividual differences, however, might influence the ease of recognition: First, as mentioned above, a positive attitude towards GFL might facilitate its processing. Second, owing to its recent introduction, younger participants will have become acquainted with it earlier in their life than older participants did. Moreover, many German universities recommend the use of the gender star in their guidelines for GFL (Schneider, 2022). Students might have thus encountered the gender star more frequently than non-students. Lexical access to star nouns might thus be easier for younger students than for older non-students.

The present study consists of two experiments employing the same lexical decision task to investigate whether the insertion of the asterisk impedes lexical access to role nouns. The first experiment was conducted with a sample of students (18–30 years). The second experiment was conducted with a more heterogenous group of older non-students (30–80 years). In each experiment, we assessed attitudes towards GFL. This and comparisons between the samples allowed us to evaluate the influence of interindividual differences.

In the lexical decision task, 72 role nouns were used as experimental items. GF was varied within subjects (star/feminine/masculine) so that every participant saw 24 role nouns in each of the forms. The semantic stereotype of the role noun was controlled (Misersky et al., 2014). To conceal the purpose of the experiment, a large number of filler items was used (48 regular words, 120 pseudowords), leading to 240 trials in total. Participants had to decide as quickly as possible whether the string presented was a German word or not, and respond via keypress. Acceptance rates and RTs for experimental items were used as dependent variables.

Our study was guided by two main research questions (RQs) for which we derived specific hypotheses (Hs). The first question addresses the status of the gender star as a German word. The second one addresses the question of its readability.

Even though the star form is, by now, frequently used by media channels and institutions (Krome, 2020; Schneider, 2022), previous surveys showed that only about 25% of the population in Germany are in favor of its use (Jäckle, 2022: 21%; Welt am Sonntag, 2020: 26%). We thus wanted to know:

We expected that the polarization of the public debate (Meuleneers, 2024) would manifest itself in the distribution of acceptance rates of star nouns: While some participants accept star nouns as words, others would always reject them. Moreover, we expected that participants with a more positive attitude towards GFL and participants of the younger, student sample would be more likely to accept the star, thus leading to the following hypotheses:

Next, we were interested in whether and how the gender star affects word recognition for those participants who, in general, accept star nouns as German words:

For this purpose, we had a closer look at RTs for accepted experimental items. Specifically, we formulated the following hypothesis:

Because more exposure to the star form is likely to facilitate lexical access, we expected the processing of star nouns to get easier over the course of the experiment:

Moreover, we formulated the following hypotheses with regard to interindividual differences:

The wide range of participants’ ages in the non-student sample furthermore allowed us to exploratorily test the influence of age on the ease of lexical access within this sample. Finally, it was an exploratory question whether gender stereotypes would influence the lexical decision process.

In the first experiment, we tested university students to make it comparable with previous research (e.g., Friedrich et al., 2021). We focused on students younger than 30 years thus representing a group of typical students in Germany (Davies, 2023).

In Experiment 2, we replicated the study described with a sample of non-students varying in age (30–80 years) and academic background. We stuck as closely to the initial design as possible, but used a more detailed questionnaire to assess attitudes towards GFL. All aspects in which Experiment 2 differed from the first one will be described in the following.

The non-binary gender star in German (e.g., Radfahrer*in – cyclist) is the most popular gender-fair alternative for generically intended masculine role nouns to refer to persons of all genders, that is, persons identifying beyond a female-male dichotomy, as well as women and men (Krome, 2020). Opponents of its use argue that its non-orthographic form impedes the readability of texts (e.g., Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, 2021). Experimental research on this claim is rare. Because visual word recognition is a crucial component of the reading process (Coltheart, 2006), we developed a lexical decision task to test whether lexical access to singular role nouns is more difficult to star nouns compared to the orthographic and more common feminine and masculine forms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the readability of the star with implicit measures and, therefore, an important contribution to the current debate on GFL in Germany. In order to account for interindividual differences, we tested not only a homogenous student sample (Experiment 1), but also a heterogenous sample of non-students varying in age as well as academic background, which is a further strength of our study (cf. Jones, 2010).

Previous surveys on the acceptance of the gender star in Germany showed that only one quarter of the German population is in favor of its use (e.g., Jäckle, 2022). Based on these findings, we expected a bimodal distribution of the acceptance of star nouns as German words. While this hypothesis was confirmed, the number of rejectors was surprisingly small: only one student and four non-students, that is, merely 2.8% of all participants rejected star nouns as words in almost all of the cases. As expected, participants of the younger, student sample were more likely to generally accept star nouns as German words. Moreover, general rejection of star nouns as words was predicted by attitudes towards GFL: Participants with a less positive attitude towards GFL were more likely to be amongst the rejectors.

A closer inspection of the influence of GF on RTs for those participants who generally accept star nouns as words, sheds light on whether lexical access to star nouns is more difficult than to the more common binary forms. For the student sample, we found no evidence for difficulties in the recognition of role nouns in star form. These findings are in line with previous findings by Friedrich et al. (2021), who reported that the use of the gender star did not increase subjectively perceived word difficulty in a student sample. The case was different for the non-student sample: Participants showed significantly slower RTs to star nouns than to binary forms. These findings suggest difficulties in lexical access due to the insertion of the non-orthographic asterisk. However, processing of the star became easier over the course of the experiment: While RTs generally decreased across time, that is, independent of GF, the decrease was significantly steeper for star nouns—up to the point where RTs were comparably fast for all GFs. This suggests an adaptation effect for the non-student sample. Thus, while the initial processing of star nouns seems to be harder, their processing becomes less effortful with time (cf. Gabriel et al., 2018)—even over the short course of the experiment. Interestingly, and not in line with our expectations, attitudes towards GFL did not predict the success of lexical access to star nouns. However, participants’ age might be a predictor: First, participants of the younger, student sample had significantly less difficulties than participants of the older, non-student sample. Second, an additional exploratory analysis within the non-student sample showed that RTs increased with age, and this increase was largest for star nouns. A possible explanation for the crucial role participants’ age seems to play for successful lexical access—in line with theories on visual word recognition (Coltheart et al., 2001; Rastle, 2016)—is the fact that the gender star has been in the public for less than a decade. Consequently, older people first encountered star nouns as adults and age of acquisition is higher. Moreover, in its guidelines for GFL, the University of Freiburg explicitly suggests replacing the generically intended masculine with gender-fair alternatives such as the gender star (cf. Schneider, 2022). Thus, students are likely to be more familiar with the star than non-students: Even though the use of GFL in the media and other public domains also increases, the usage of GFL is, in general, less common and less systematic in informal contexts (cf. Gabriel et al., 2018). A gender-fair form useful to further investigate the role of age of acquisition and familiarity is the capital-I form, as this non-orthographic abbreviation of the pair form has already been in use since the 1980s. Comparing word recognition of the capital-I and the gender star form in older readers might allow us to differentiate more thoroughly between the influences of orthography, familiarity, and age of acquisition.

Another interesting finding is that gender stereotypes are activated already on the word level. In line with previous studies (e.g., Sato et al., 2016; Zacharski & Ferstl, 2023), we found consistency effects for the binary forms in the non-student sample: RTs were faster when the semantic stereotype matched the grammatical gender of the role noun. Thus, semantics are activated in the processing of different GFs—even if the meaning of role nouns is irrelevant for the participants’ task. A more subtle semantic influence was found for students with a positive attitude towards GFL. Here, RTs to star nouns decreased more slowly over the duration of the experiment when the role noun was stereotypically male, as compared to stereotypically female and neutral nouns. Further research is needed to investigate potential interactions between attitudes, gender stereotypicality, and non-binary forms such as the gender star.

Even though one strength of our study is that a lexical decision task allows processes on the word level to be tested early on and without potential influences of text context, word recognition is only one component of the reading process. Future studies should investigate the processing of the gender star on the text level using implicit measures such as eye-tracking. It will be moreover interesting to consider further interindividual differences. In particular, in order to find out more about the influence of participants’ gender identity on the processing of GFL, we have to take all genders into account—particularly those identifying beyond the binary. Furthermore, future studies should test how different forms of GFL affect persons with reading disorders, or L2-learners.