Gender-fair language in German aims to reduce the male bias induced by masculine generics. Some forms use capital letters (capital-I form: StudentIn – student) or special characters (gender star: Student*in) within role nouns. Concerns have been raised that such forms, which are not in line with German orthography, might impede the readability of texts. Previous studies found no decrease in subjective comprehensibility of texts (e.g., Friedrich et al. 2021, Pabst & Kollmayer 2023). Zacharski et al. (2025) reported initial lexical access difficulties for older nonstudents, but their design did not allow to differentiate whether these are due to orthography or factors like familiarity and age of acquisition. To address this, an eye-tracking study was conducted to compare the readability of texts using the capital-I form, which has been used since the 1980s, and the nowadays more frequently used gender star in a sample of 49 students (M = 22.18; f: 24, m: 25) and a group of older nonstudents (40-70 years; data collection in progress). Participants read 24 short newspaper articles with four tokens of a stereotypically neutral plural role noun in either star, capital-I, or masculine form (counterbalanced), and 8 filler texts without any inflectable role nouns. Surprisingly, for students, analysis of first pass and total reading times as well as total fixation counts revealed reduced reading times but higher fixation counts for the star. Data analysis for the older sample will shed light on whether these effects are due to the form’s salience or the students’ familiarity with it.