Gender-fair language makes women and other genders, their interests, and their achievements more visible and is particularly relevant to grammatical gender languages such as German, in which most nouns and personal pronouns are assigned to a specific gender. The present study tested the often repeated critical claims that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of videos. In an experiment with N= 105 students, participants watched a video on self-determination theory, either with masculine-only forms or using the glottal stop, a form of spoken gender-fair language that inserts an abrupt and sustained closure of the vocal cords in the larynx between the masculine form or the stem and the feminine ending of words (e.g. in German "Leser?innen", similar to fe?male readers). Subsequently, participants completed a questionnaire regarding the video's comprehensibility. The results show no statistically significant impairment regarding the general subjective comprehensibility (partial eta(2) < .01), the ease of ascribing meaning to the words (partial eta(2) < .01), the ease of decoding the syntax of the sentences (partial eta(2) =.03), or the aesthetic appeal of the videos (partial eta(2) =.02). The critics' claims are therefore questioned.
