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In public and academic debates, the gender star has been criticized for potentially hindering text comprehensibility and imposing an additional burden on learners of German by complicating an already complex language. We investigated in an experiment whether the use of the gender star (e.g., Student * innen) complicates text comprehensibility compared to masculine generics for learners of German. Participants were 80 Flemish students studying German as a foreign language. They were asked to read 13 short news articles, of which ten texts served as experimental items in either gender star or masculine form. Participants' accuracy in answering content questions, subjective ratings of text comprehensibility and sentence difficulty, and their full-text reading times were assessed. Additionally, we collected data on participants' proficiency in German, prior knowledge of, and attitudes toward gender-fair German. Our results suggest that the gender star does not pose a strong hindrance to text comprehensibility for Flemish students learning German: while proficiency in German had a significant effect on content question accuracy and sentence difficulty as well as subjective comprehensibility ratings, this effect was independent of gender form.
Decock et al. (Thu,) studied this question.