In many languages, the masculine form of nouns referring to persons has a dual function. It can refer to both, male persons and persons of all genders (generic masculine). Many experiments have demonstrated that even the generic masculine (e.g., die Bürger) leads to a male bias, i.e., readers or listeners predominantly think of men. In written German, various strategies of gender-aware language have been proposed to reduce this bias (e.g., Lehrerinnen, Lehrer:innen*); in spoken German, a form that separates the word stem from the female suffix by a glottal stop is used (e.g., Lehrerʔinnen).

To investigate the influence of the glottal stop form compared to the generic masculine on the cognitive representation of gender, we applied the visual world paradigm. In each experimental trial, a picture of four persons (two male and two female) was presented while an auditory text including a generic masculine noun or a glottal stop form was played. Based on the eye-mind hypothesis, we assumed that participants focus their gaze on persons they have in mind when hearing the sentences. By measuring dwell times on the depicted persons, we drew conclusions about gender representations elicited by different gender forms.

Our results revealed a significant difference between the conditions. In both conditions, female individuals received more attention than male individuals. However, the glottal stop form elicited a stronger female bias (t(139)=−1.86, p=0.032, d=−0.31). These findings suggest that the glottal stop form enhances the representation of female individuals compared to the generic masculine.