Gender-fair language makes women and people of other genders, their interests, and achievements more visible. However, critics argue that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of texts. This study tests these assumptions specifically concerning the gender asterisk, a form of gender-fair language that makes people…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

Overlaps with one's interlocutor in the choice of words are called lexical entrainment. This article looks at accounts for these overlaps in word use. The question addressed is the extent to which the word use of the addressee, as opposed to available words from other sources, has a special impact on experts' choice of words. A laboratory…