Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

 

Meeting 16: Linguistic Relativism - Gender

October 16, 2008

 

Your linguistic relativism ideas from last time

 

Homework 3

 

Sex and grammatical gender

 

All languages have ways to distinguish between biological males and females. Some languages also use these same linguistic mechanisms to talk about things that donÕt have a biological sex.

 

 

Spanish

German

key

feminine

masculine

bridge

masculine

feminine

 

Grammatical gender is mostly arbitrary – nothing about a key makes it masculine or feminine.

 

But grammatical genders also apply to things with biological gender – most females are grammatically feminine and most males are grammatically masculine. So thereÕs a conceptual core to the grammatical gender categories.

 

In languages with grammatical gender, all nouns have a gender, and this gender has to be expressed systematically when the noun is used.

 

Grammatical gender is a good candidate

 

Does grammatical gender affect nonlinguistic cognition?

 

Because you have to pay attention to the grammatical gender of things you refer to using nouns, perhaps you notice those attributes of objects that are associated with the biological sex.

 

Exp 1: Patrick the apple

á      Question: does the grammatical gender of nouns affect recall?

á      Taught Spanish and German speakers proper names in English (Patrick, Patricia, etc.) for 24 objects

á      All objects had opposite genders in the two languages

á      Half of the names were gender-consistent with their native language

á      Tested their memory for the names

á      Prediction: when the gender of the name was compatible with the gender of the object in the pptÕs native language, then the ppt should remember the name better

á      Results: They found the predicted effect. In addition, native English speakers (a control group) recalled the names as well as the non-native speakers did in the compatible condition.

á      This suggests that gender incompatibility inhibited recall.

Exp 2: Elegant or jagged keys?

á      Question: Does grammatical gender of nouns affect what attributes you ascribe to objects?

á      Made a list of 24 objects in English that have opposite genders in Spanish and German (half were of each gender in each language)

á      Presented them in English to native speakers of German and Spanish

á      Asked them to write down the first three adjectives that came to mind

á      Then had native speakers of English rate all the mentioned adjectives as masculine or feminine

á      Prediction: adjectives consistent with the grammatical gender of the object in the pptÕs native language

á      Results: German speakers produced more feminine adjectives for objects that were feminine in German and more masculine adjectives for objects that were masculine in German; and the same for Spanish speakers.

o   E.g. key for Spanish speakers: golden, intricate, little lovely, shiny

o   For German speakers: hard, heavy, jagged, metal, useful

á      This shows that how people think about objects is affected by the grammatical gender system of their native language

 

Exp 3: Is it language or culture?

á      Question: can the same effects arise even without cultural differences?

á      Showed native English speakers pictures of 4 males and 4 females as well as 12 inanimate objects

á      Taught them the words for these picures in a made-up language, Gumbuzi.

á      Gumbuzi has a soupative/oosative distinction – all words are preceded by either sou- or oos-.

á      The soupative/oosative groups always corresponded to biological gender, but which inanimate objects were in each group was counterbalanced across ppts.

á      After learning the names for all the pictures, they saw all the pictures again, unlabeled and were asked to generate adjectives for them.

á      Those adjectives were again rated by independent judges as masculine or feminine

á      Prediction: more masculine adjectives when the picture had been learned in the same group as the males, and more feminine adjectives when it have been in the group with females

á      Results: Same finding as with the Spanish and German speakers.

á      This suggests that even without cultural differences, language differences can affect the perceived properties of objects

 

Group work: Come up with another method for testing effects of grammatical gender, a method not employed in this paper. Describe the procedure you would use, and how the stimuli would be presented.