After completing the relevant part of the study, the participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire containing a question about their strategy for making decisions about the gender of the assigned voices in order to investigate whether grammatical gender is a consciously considered trait , as well as their proficiency in languages other than Polish for potential cognitive interference, especially in case of images.
We assumed that performing the task of assigning male or female voices would activate the representation of objects and involve focusing on biological sex. According to the sex and gender hypothesis, grammatical gender effects should be present in case of animals. According to the similarity and gender hypothesis, there should be grammatical gender effects for animals and inanimate objects. It was therefore expected that both for visual and verbal stimuli, grammatically masculine objects and animals would more often be given male voices, and vice versa — grammatically feminine objects and animals would be given female voices.
In the post-experimental survey, none of the respondents declared basing their decisions on grammatical gender.
Answers female vs. The consistency ratings could have any value between 0 always inconsistent with grammatical gender and 1 always consistent with gender. These ratings were compared to random chance of 0. A strong consistency of voice with grammatical gender was present for all conditions.
Another analysis was conducted to investigate differences in gender effects across treatments. It was expected that masculine nouns would be given male voices more often than grammatically feminine nouns. Fractions of male voices assigned by participants to nouns in different treatments are presented in Figure 4. Figure 4. Proportions of male voices assigned by grammatical gender and stimulus type. This experiment had two main goals.
The first was to confirm the role of grammatical gender in conceptual representations in Polish and secondly, to check whether grammatical gender information transfers to non-verbal material. Images of objects and words were more often assigned a voice consistent with their grammatical gender — male voices were assigned to grammatically masculine objects and female voices to feminine objects.
The influence of grammatical gender on the assignment of voice occurred both for animate animals and inanimate nouns objects. Moreover, the effect was present and comparable for verbal and visual stimuli, and for each separate category. The occurrence of such a strong effect for each category indicates the importance of gender information in conceptual representations.
The effect was probably influenced by the nature of the experimental task, which consisted of assigning a female or male voice to individual objects, and thus explicitly referred to the category of biological sex, which could have cognitively activated gender information and facilitated access to it. The fact that there were no significant differences in the results between words and pictures may be associated with the tendency to quietly verbalize the names of objects when recognizing them in the pictures.
As demonstrated by Cubelli et al. Assigning male and female voices to animals and inanimate objects according to the grammatical gender of their names shows that the grammatical gender effects in Polish may be present at the conceptual level, when gender is an explicit part of the decision task.
It is worth noting that while Experiments 1 and 2 were aimed at investigating implicit cognition under time pressure, they lacked ecological validity. In contrast, Experiment 3 uses a procedure which resembles a real-life decision of choosing what voice to give to an animated character in an upcoming movie. The procedure was akin to eliciting preferences in a survey. Results of all three experiments are therefore more generalizable to other tasks. Grammatical gender is an important syntactic phenomenon which can affect the semantic level of processing and various cognitive processes.
However, research on the scope and factors of this impact delivers inconsistent results. It is assumed see Sera et al. The purpose of our work was to investigate the extent of grammatical gender effects in Polish. The specificity of the Polish language 5 grammatical genders which obscure the correspondence between genders of nouns and sex of their referents, but on the other hand, a large number of grammatical gender markers prompted us to test the similarity and gender hypothesis and the sex and gender hypothesis in this language.
We were also interested in whether gender effects could appear both at the lexicosemantic level and at the conceptual level. The presented research improves upon existing studies of grammatical gender effects in Polish and in general in the following ways: In Experiment 1, we investigated the influence of grammatical gender on categorization within triads of nouns, using not only animals and inanimate objects, but also abstract nouns as stimuli.
Most of existing studies use either inanimate objects or animals, and not abstract ideas. Neither inanimate objects nor abstract ideas generated the expected grammatical gender effect in our study, with the effect for abstract nouns reversed. Experiment 2 was conducted using a method based on the IAT Greenwald et al.
The main merit of IAT is that it is based on implicit cognition. Since grammatical gender effects were present in Experiment 2, we can conclude that grammatical gender influences cognition in an implicit manner, and not just due to overt classification strategies.
We modified the experiment by including both visual stimuli images and verbal stimuli names of the relevant objects allowing a direct comparison between the stimuli types. Grammatical gender effects occurred for both animate impersonal nouns animals and inanimate nouns objects. Moreover, the influence of grammatical gender turned out to be similar for verbal and visual stimuli. Our research adds to the existing data showing that the grammatical gender effects are influenced by interlingual differences in the grammatical structure of the gender system.
Results seem to contradict the notion that the number of grammatical genders two vs. While research in German suggested that gender systems including more than two grammatical genders may not generate grammatical gender effects, these effects are present in Polish, a language with three singular and two more plural grammatical genders. This in turn may suggest that the number of grammatical genders is of lesser importance than the linguistic context at a syntactic level, and the multitude of gender markers.
The obtained results primarily support the similarity and gender hypothesis, which assumes that it is easier to assign similar meanings to words which have similar syntactic and morphological properties. Polish is characterized by a large number of grammatical gender markers. It seems that both the sex and gender and the similarity and gender hypotheses can be used to explain grammatical gender effects in various tasks. If the experimental design explicitly activates thinking in categories of biological sex e.
This would explain the variability of results in our research and would mean that the sex and gender and similarity and gender hypotheses are complementary.
Further research may focus on investigating the mechanisms and language aspects which cause interlingual differences in grammatical gender effects. Another interesting path for future research may use plural forms, which at least in Polish also have different grammatical genders. An interesting issue for future research involves investigating whether grammatical gender effects change along the length of the experiments, i. Unfortunately in the presented study, the data was automatically coded item-wise, not taking into account the changes in item order in various counterbalancing sets, hence making such post hoc analyses impossible.
The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Applied Psychology ethics commitee, with written informed consent from all subjects.
All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Jagiellonian University Institute of Applied Psychology ethics commitee. JM: idea and conceptualization, literature survey, preparation of the method, manuscript preparation and editing, and project leader. MP: conceptualization, literature survey, statistical analyses, manuscript preparation and editing, and corresponding author.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Boroditsky, L. Alterman and D. Google Scholar. Advances in the Study of Language and Thought , eds D. Gentner, and S. Boutonnet, B. Unconscious effects of grammatical gender during object categorisation. Brain Res. Brugman, K. Clarke, M. Gender perception in Arabic and English. Cubelli, R. The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization.
Deutscher, G. New York, NY: Metropolitan. Fodor, I. The origin of grammatical gender. Lingua 8, 1— Greenwald, A. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Does grammatical gender influence perception? A study of polish and french speakers. Jakobson, R. Konishi, T. The semantics of grammatical gender: a cross-cultural study. Kousta, S. Investigating linguistic relativity through bilingualism: the case of grammatical gender.
Lucy, J. Montefinese, M. No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages.
Prewitt-Freilino, J. The gendering of language: a comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, neutral gender, and genderless languages. Sex Roles 66, — Zjednoczeni w mowie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Ramos, S. What constrains grammatical gender effects on semantic judgements? Evidence from portuguese. Segel, E. Grammar in art. Sera, M. When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification.
Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by english and Spanish speakers. Speed, L. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, and J. Vigliocco, G. In Japanese, some words are masculine and feminine, or strictly spoken by men. This is just with the spoken language.
German gender. One must learn the gender together with the noun as though it were one word rather than two. After all, they modernized their hand-written alphabet ninety or so years back. The English language is relatively easy to learn regards its one article, the THE. Spelling is the bug-a-boo. English needs to modernize spelling, tossing out the many French spellings.
One can learn the German pronunciation of its alphabet and almost read the language out loud without knowing a word you are reading. Impossible in the French or English language. Excellent comments. Grammatical gender in a language has absolutely nothing to do with sexism. We have three grammatic genders in Spanish and none of the identity politics and gender segregation of anglo-saxons.
Stop the bullshit, stop trying to impose your view of the world on other peoples. Stop feeling morally superior. Manu, you seem to have overlooked that a sample of one i. Spanish in Spain is not a statistically significant sample.
There are very few languages without a grammatical gender, besides English, and most of them are languages from Islamic countries. I dare say the languages that differentiate between grammatical genders like almost every European country have better equality. I like your answer. People seem to concentrate on the sex part of the nouns without taking in consideration that it is related to the end of the word.
Ex: casa ends in a is femenine, plato ends in o is masculine. Most nouns that end in in consonants are masculine. Like in every rule there are exceptions, some have to do with the word in a gramatical sense, how it will sound put together in a sentence. You simply stated genders are a way of classifying nouns……….
Verbs and adjectives have also been classified as group 1, group 2, strong verbs, weak adjectives, etc. It determined roles and the development of culture; why would it not also influence the development of language? It is perhaps harder today to see how being born a male or a female would be the primary way of determining your behaviour; roles are far more flexible today and continue to evolve. However, our ancestors did not enjoy this kind of flexibility and the language they created reflected the importance of this division.
For those who think languages should drop this cumbersome division — it will shut doors for those of us who take pleasure in learning more a culture through learning its language.
Moreover, though all languages are constantly evolving, simplification for the sake of making a language more accessible comes with the price of destroying some of its beauty and uniqueness. Anything that inhibits or reduces the efficiency of that will likely not survive for a thousand more years. Yes, languages have beauty and transmit culture, addling sparkle and interest to learning them.
Right now, for example, all airlines around the world, often even within their own countries, use English because of its ease of expression, speed of ID, and crispness of sound. Expect to see more of that as languages, none which are perfect, continue to evolve.
And, BTW, my computer never did care all that much whether a cat was masculine or feminine! They use English for one reason only: it is the primary global language. There is no intrinsic feature about English that makes it somehow preferable to any other language. If there aren't at least two, you don't have kinds.
There are two kinds of kinds: natural, and arbitrary. The former refers to systems where nouns are classified according to some meaning property, and the latter is the situation where nouns are divided arbitrarily. It appears, from a historical analysis of gender systems, that arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems which have gotten sufficiently complicated that nobody can figure out the natural system anymore, so instead you just memorize things.
There are not any attested absolutely arbitrary gender systems, but western European languages come pretty close. So whether most languages with gender fall into the "more or less arbitrary" subset depends on how you draw the dividing line between "mostly arbitrary" vs.
Languages have gender which isn't just about sex because it has had been useful to say things about the nature of objects. English has almost freed itself of gender distinctions, but we do still have differences in pronouns. Some Kurdish dialects likewise have eliminated noun gender except that it is sort of possible to distinguish male and female human 3rd person pronouns.
We're moving towards getting rid of the pronoun distinction, so just be patient and in a few more centuries it will be gone. There seems to be some confusion over arbitrariness. In the architypical natural gender system, gender actually is assigned by rules that refer to semantic property. Since arbitrary gender systems derive from natural gender systems, there are often statistical traces of that rule system.
With a sufficiently rich coding system and statistical software, you can always eke out some correlation between e. Masculine things tend to be straight and stiff. Feminine tend to be round, soft and tricky. Neuter tend to be formless. This is masculine:. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Despite originating in the Western Christian tradition, its use has spread throughout the world and now transcends religious, cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Antidote 11 Antidote Web Antidote Mobile. Antidote Web Client Portal. Language Matters - October 1, - 4 min. Metaphorical gender can be applied to ships 1 and many other entities, such as stock prices 2 : 1 Is she on an even keel? Even ships named after men, such as the German battleship Bismarck , are treated as feminine: On her maiden voyage, the Bismarck collided with another ship but she sustained no damage. Computers, Robots and Tools Based on evidence collected by linguists, both he and she are used when referencing devices, although he is used perhaps less frequently than she.
Nations European nations have been traditionally personified as feminine, although this usage is now mostly archaic. Earth Long associated with fertility and nurturing, our planet is frequently referred to as Mother Earth, taking the pronoun her in this popular Christmas carol: Joy to the world, the Lord has come, Let earth receive her king Animals and Young Children Conversely, metaphorical gender can be used to remove gender from animate entities with a biological sex, especially when the sex is not obvious, such as when babies and animals are referred to as it : I hear you had a baby.
Hurricanes Meteorologists began naming hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin with female-only names in Blanche, perfectly formed… … flirting with the Florida coastline In the s feminists pressured the field to change its practices and, starting with Hurricane Bob in , hurricanes are now given alternating feminine and masculine names and are referred to as it. Recommendations Just as we have abandoned feminine pronouns for hurricanes, and as the explicit mention of gender when irrelevant and gender stereotypes become increasingly criticized, many institutions have begun referring to ships as neuter entities.
This article was concocted by. Other articles to explore See all. Language Matters - December 1,
0コメント