The Factors Affecting the Gender Connotations of Language for the Deaf Child

The generics (man, he) have been demonstrated to evoke predominately masculine imagery in female and male hearing students. Recommendations have been made to replace, whenever possible, these generics with more gender neutral terms like someone or people. These words, however, may also carry masculine connotations and limit sex-inclusive imagery. The present study examined the adequacy of this replacement strategy for hearing-impaired students. Results show that generally the neutral terms enabled students to limit masculine bias. However, a closer examination of the different patterns of associations to singular and plural words and to word presentation formats (name vs. picture options) suggests that there may be an important difference between the ability to be sex-inclusive and the ability to be self-relevant. The implications of this finding and suggestions for further research are discussed.