1 Gender Sensitivity: How Identity and Ideology Impact Grammatical Processing in Spanish-users Anton Dolling1,2 1Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies 2Department of Linguistics 2 ABSTRACT: Spanish uses a binary noun classification system that assigns the grammatical gender of nouns (i.e., feminine, masculine). Other grammatical elements such as articles and adjectives must agree in gender with the noun. For human referents, gender agreement is presumed to accord with the semantic (i.e. real-world) gender of the referent. However, binary gender systems cannot describe the gender identities of all people, such as transgender or non-binary individuals. Members of these communities share a broader, more fluid interpretation of gender and minimize the presumptions made about a person's gender. We examine whether this off-line awareness of the social construction of gender affects speakers' sensitivity to grammatical gender during on-line processing. Spanish-speakers of a variety of sexual and gender identities are compared by recording their eye movements while reading Spanish sentences in which grammatical gender either does or does not concord with animate and inanimate referents. We hypothesize that participants whose off-line perception of gender is more flexible through interaction with a variety of gender identities may show decreased sensitivity to incidents of 'unanticipated' or 'non-concording' grammatical gender when reading, compared to individuals who do not interact with people whose gender identity is outside of the binary. KEY WORDS: eye movements, gender identity, grammatical gender, sexual identity, Spanish, transgender 3 Introduction The Spanish language is like many others in that it organizes nouns into distinct classes which are then treated differently during morpho-syntactic agreement processes. With few exceptions, all nouns, whether animate or inanimate, are classified as feminine or masculine—but to what extent does this classification reach? The answer would be simpler if these classes were confined solely to the grammatical domain of language, but they, being used to classify human referents (among other things), are conflated with two social categories known as gender, from which the names 'feminine' and 'masculine' are derived. We must therefore make a distinction between grammatical gender, which is encoded in language, and semantic (social) gender—that is, a person's gender identity. For human referents, the grammatical gender (noun class) of the word must concord with the semantic gender (gender identity) of the human referent in order to form an acceptable utterance and so to categorize such a noun in one regard is to categorize it in the other. This contrasts with the classification of non-human nouns (especially inanimate ones) which have only a grammatical gender and do not have any semantic/social gender, except perhaps in certain, limited metaphorical senses (“She’s a beauty” when referring to a yacht). A language (and society) whose resources for categorizing a person's gender consist only of a binary system does not suffice for people whose identities are, for example, neither woman nor man, or non-binary, gender fluid, agender, etc. (Lenning 2009; Zimman 2017). In comparison to English, which only marks gender agreement in limited contexts, Spanish speakers are put into a more difficult situation because the language requires that, in addition to nouns, articles and adjectives relating to a noun must bear concording gender markings (i.e., gender inflection or agreement). Except for the first person singular (yo, I) and second person singular (tú, you) pronouns, all subject pronouns and third person direct object pronouns are marked for gender as 4 well. In response to these linguistic limitations on gender expression, Spanish users (specifically those in the trans and queer communities) have spurred the use of innovative and inclusive language that is gender neutral. One example of such language innovation is the increasingly prevalent use of the word 'Latinx', which has been the subject of discussion and controversy over recent years (de Onís 2017; Monzó 2016; Patterson 2017; Ramirez & Blay 2017; Reichard 2015; Reyes 2016). Conventionally, a Spanish-user of Latin American ethnicity might describe themself using the words latina or latino which are morphologically marked for feminine and masculine gender, respectively. The written forms latino/a and latin@ were employed to maintain inclusivity while avoiding cumbersome repetition of latin-, analogous to English's use of the form 's/he' versus 'he or she'. However, even latin@ is very limited, alluding only to the binary gender system (feminine and masculine) and thereby not meeting the needs of many of those in the queer community. 'Latinx' was then born both as an all-inclusive, gender-unspecific descriptor, and as an individual, non-binary identity (Padilla 2016). It is important to point out, however, that 'Latinx' is primarily used in majority English-speaking settings such as the US, a fact that is a source of some of its controversies in the broader Spanish-speaking world (Blogger 2018; de Onís 2017). Gender-neutral pronouns have also been an area of innovation. The third person singular (3SG) subject pronoun for human referents has the two conventional forms ella (she, feminine) and él (he, masculine). In order to accurately describe their gender identity, non-binary and gender- non-conforming Spanish users have created novel pronouns that are gender-neutral. These are variations of the pre-existing pronouns with the gender marking morpheme removed or changed (élle/éle) (Cactuscom 2015; Élle, July 23; Peñuelas 2015; Skvat 2012; Wikipedia 2018). It is not surprising that resistance to these linguistic changes has been high in the rest of the Spanish- 5 speaking community, considering that pronouns are typically a closed word class, meaning that it is resistant to the adoption of new forms (Azevedo, 2009); however, it would be erroneous to assume that this resistance is not also due in part to prejudice towards gender non-conforming people (e.g. Clark & Jackson 2018; Grant et al. 2012; Lombardi et al. 2001; McLemore 2014; Stern 2011; Zimman 2017). As stated above, in addition to nouns and pronouns, Spanish encodes gender on most adjectives in agreement with the nouns that they modify (e.g. libro rojo bookmasculine redmasculine v caja roja boxfeminine redfeminine). Studies have shown that Spanish users anticipate the grammatical gender of these words and use it to build sentence meaning (e.g. Wicha et al. 2004). In contrast, English does not have an explicit grammatical gender system, but instead reserves marking gender almost exclusively for the third-person singular pronoun and possessives (e.g. Maria found her book v Phil found his book; Baron 1971). It is here that it has commonality with Spanish, leading to language change fueled by the need for non-binary and gender-neutral pronouns. For some time, the English 3SG pronoun has had three 'standard' forms that vary by gender: feminine and masculine for human referents (she, he), and neutral for non-human referents (it) (Baron 1971). More recently, the use of a gender-neutral 3SG pronoun for human referents has (re)emerged in the form of the singular they. This epicene pronoun was more widely used before prescriptivism (steered by androcentrism) attempted to quash it in the seventeenth century, instituting he as the standard epicene pronoun (Balhorn 2004; Bodine 1975; Laitinen 2008). Not until the women's movement in the 1970s was the epicene use of he more broadly regarded as being sexist language. Indeed, past studies suggests that they as an epicene pronoun is more inclusive than he, allowing readers to conceptualize referents of more genders than compared to he, which favors the 6 conceptualization of male referents and consequently slows sentence processing when coupled with female referents/antecedents (Gastil 1990; Khosroshahi 1989; Noll et al. 2018). With the growing interest in singular they, studies examining the use of singular they and its derivatives (their, them, themself/themselves) as epicene pronouns have suggested that there are syntactically-associated gender features on nouns in English, despite the lack of morphology (Ackerman n.d.; Ackerman et al. 2018; Bjorkman 2017; Doherty & Conklin 2017). Conceptual information influences the processing of syntactic relationships (Bock & Levelt 1994; Bock, Loebell, & Morey 1992; Bock & Warren 1985; Vigliocco & Franck 2001), and so is thought to be the source of these gender features. Various studies cite reliance on stereotypical expectations of gender as the cause for sentence processing slowdowns, particularly in relation to occupations (e.g. Carreiras et al. 1996; Duffy & Keir 2004; Kennison & Trofe 2003; Reali et al. 2015; Sturt 2002), and activities (e.g. Karniol et al. 2016). Doherty and Conklin (2017) found that participants relied on gender-expectancies of the antecedent to resolve they/them pronoun coreference to professions (e.g. nurse, mechanic, cyclist). Increased gender-expectancy correlated with decreased acceptability of the gender-neutral pronoun, as well as with increased processing cost as measured by reading fixations in an eye-tracking study. Importantly, Doherty and Conklin (2017) assert that gender-expectancy is not encoded as a strict, all-or-nothing binary, but rather varies in strength depending on semantic probabilities. Studies that utilize the event-related potentials (ERP) technique