Graduation Year
2026
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Reader 1
Ernesto Gutierrez Topete
Reader 2
Gabriela Bacsán
Reader 3
Michael Diercks
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
This study investigates how native (L1) and second-language (L2) Spanish speakers process non-binary gender morphology, focusing on the pronoun ‘elle’ and the adjective/noun ending ‘-e’. Prior studies show that native speakers outperform L2 speakers in processing traditional masculine–feminine agreement, non-binary forms and their emergence in a binary grammatical system are understudied. To address this gap, I conducted an online reaction-time experiment with bilingual speakers from the Claremont Colleges, who judged the grammaticality of Spanish sentences containing either grammatical gender or social gender (él/ella/elle) agreement and disagreement. Survey data also captured participants’ familiarity with and attitudes toward the pronoun ‘elle’. The findings indicate that although non-binary gender constructions are new to Spanish, native speakers adapt to them efficiently within real-time processing, whereas L2 speakers show heightened sensitivity to the ‘elle’ pronoun and ‘-e’ forms. The study contributes to emerging work on gender-inclusive language by demonstrating that both social and grammatical factors shape how speakers integrate non-binary pronouns into a gendered linguistic system.
Recommended Citation
Gustafson, Abigail H., "Integrating Non-Binary Morphology Into Spanish Grammatical Gender: A Study on Native and Second-Language Speakers" (2026). Scripps Senior Theses. 2844.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2844
Included in
First and Second Language Acquisition Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Morphology Commons, Spanish Linguistics Commons
