Abstract
<jats:p> Many morphological innovations have been proposed to expand the boundaries of gender binarism in Italian. To test the interpretation of <jats:italic>-ə</jats:italic> we designed an experiment adapting the sentence-picture matching task used by Bradley, Salkind, Moore, and Teitsort in 2019 for English. The study sets out to establish whether (i) the adoption of <jats:italic>-ə</jats:italic> entails activation of a nonbinary referent (or group) or a mixed-gender group; (ii) the comprehension of sentences containing <jats:italic>-ə</jats:italic> requires higher processing costs, by looking at participants’ response times; (iii) the masculine form triggers the specific interpretation more frequently. To disentangle the contribution of linguistic processing from potential visual interference, a follow-up study was later conducted without images. </jats:p>