Conceptualizing the world as ‘female’ or ‘male’: Further remarks on grammatical gender and speakers’ cognition

Experimental research on grammatical gender and cognition provides evidence for grammatical gender effects on various aspects of speakers’ cognition. Some researchers argue that such effects are limited to languages with a two-gender system. Other studies, however, find that the grammatical category of gender impacts on cognition also in languages with a three-gender system. Based on a sex attribution task, the present paper examines the relationship between grammatical gender and cognition in two languages with a three-gender system, Greek and German, and aligns with the second group of studies. The overall results are discussed in the light of previous research from a critical perspective

Are Chinese and German Children Taxonomic, Thematic, or Shape Biased? Influence of Classifiers and Cultural Contexts

This paper explores the effect of classifiers on young children's conceptual structures. For this purpose we studied Mandarin Chinese- and German-speaking 3- and 5-year-olds on non-lexical classification, novel-noun label extension, and inductive inference of novel properties. Some effect of the classifier system was found in Chinese children, but this effect was observed only in a non-lexical categorization task. In the label extension and property generalization tasks, children of the two language groups show strikingly similar behavior. The implications of the results for theories of the relation between language and thought as well as cultural influence on thought are discussed

GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND OBJECT PERCEPTION OF ENGLISH-ARABIC BILINGUAL CHILDREN

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the possible effects of grammatical gender on objects perception. It examined how Arabic grammatical gender system can affect objects’ perception of Arabic native speakers. The sample of the study consisted of ninety eight English-Arabic bilingual children. A cognitive experiment was carried out in order to investigate gender effects (picture similarity task followed by confidence scale). The result of this study revealed that there was no effect of Arabic grammatical gender on object perception of the participants. The study revealed that Arabic-English bilingual speakers end up thinking about objects which are grammatical gender in Arabic as neutral depending on the object’s grammatical gender in their second language.  Article visualizations

Constructing a second language: some final thoughts

All the papers in this special section address issues central to cognitive linguistics research: usage-based models with their focus on frequency; multi-word units and the relationship between lexical and grammatical knowledge; and the nature of lexical meaning, especially construal or “thinking for speaking”. Cognitive Linguistics is thus clearly a useful paradigm for L2 research. The contributors also emphasise that many of the processes operating in L1 acquisition are relevant in L2A as well. In this paper, I discuss the opposite side of the coin: how cognitively-inspired L2 research can inform work on first language learning and theoretical linguistics, focussing in particular on three issues that have been extensively studied in an L2 context but neglected by the other language sciences: transfer of knowledge between constructions, the role of explicit learning, and individual differences in linguistic knowledg

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

Many languages assign nouns to a grammatical gender class, such that ‘bed’ might be assigned masculine gender in one language (e.g. Italian) but feminine gender in another (e.g. Spanish). In the context of research assessing the potential for language to influence thought (the linguistic relativity hypothesis), a number of scholars have investigated whether grammatical gender assignment ‘rubs off’ on concepts themselves, such that Italian speakers might conceptualise beds as more masculine than Spanish speakers. We systematically reviewed 43 pieces of empirical research examining grammatical gender and thought, which together tested 5,895 participants. We classified the findings in terms of their support for this hypothesis, and assessed the results against parameters previously identified as potentially influencing outcomes. Overall, we found that support was strongly task- and context-dependent, and rested heavily on outcomes that have clear and equally-viable alternative explanations. We also argue that it remains unclear whether grammatical gender is in fact a useful tool for investigating relativity

‘She says, he says’: Does the sex of an instructor interact with the grammatical gender of targets in a perspective-taking task?

Aims and objectives: It has been claimed that grammatical gender can influence the perception of objects as being potentially more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. The present study investigated effects of facilitation or interference on object selection by speakers whose L1 marks grammatical gender even when selecting objects in an L2 (English) which does not mark grammatical gender. Additionally, and in order to establish whether bilingualism itself influenced performance owing to a proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control, we investigated whether bilinguals would be more efficient than monolinguals at taking the allocentric perspective and switching between perspectives. Methodology: Participants were asked to select objects by an instructor whose biological sex (and voice) was either congruent or incongruent with the grammatical gender of the object to be selected. Two groups of 16 bilinguals each were recruited on the basis of whether their L1s marked for grammatical gender or not, and a further group of 16 monolingual English speakers were tested as a control. Data and analysis: Groups were compared by means of mixed-design repeated measures ANOVAs with response times for target selections as the dependent variables. Findings: When tested in English, bilinguals whose L1 marked grammatical gender showed no effect of gender congruency in this task, nor did bilinguals outperform monolinguals in taking the allocentric perspective or in perspective switching. Originality: For the first time, potential grammatical gender effects were investigated on a task where the fast and accurate processing of real male and female voices is fundamental to the efficiency of object selection performance. Implications: The present findings are interpreted as evidence that the effects of L1 grammatical gender on tasks performed in an L2 do not extend to tasks where the link between biological sex and grammatical gender is not made explicit. </jats:sec

Language and cognition : effects of grammatical gender on the categorisation of objects

PhD ThesisOne of the key testing grounds for investigating linguistic relativity is to study the effects of grammatical gender on speakers of two languages (bilinguals) who have the category of gender present in only one of their languages. Previous studies have shown that speakers of grammatically gendered languages think of objects as being either masculine or feminine according to the grammatical gender of the objects’ nouns. This study investigates the possible effects of grammatical gender on Arabic-English bilinguals and on two ‘control’ monolingual speakers of Arabic and English. Specifically, two cognitive experiments were carried out in order to investigate gender effects with variations in task instructions and task demands (categorisation vs. similarity ratings). In the first experiment, the bilingual and monolingual participants were asked to attribute masculine and feminine voices to pictures of inanimate items. The results show that the English speakers assigned voices arbitrarily, whereas the Arabic monolinguals attributed more masculine voices to objects whose noun is grammatically masculine in Arabic and more feminine voices to objects whose noun is grammatically feminine in that language, showing the strong effects of the Arabic grammatical gender system. The bilinguals were not greatly affected by the gender system and their voice attributions were somewhere between the two monolingual groups. In the second experiment, the monolinguals and Arabic-English bilinguals were asked to rate similarities between pairs on seven-point scales. The rating task used only pictorial stimuli in an attempt to prevent any strategic use of grammatical gender. Results show that all groups rated the pairs similarly and did not significantly diverge from each other. Overall, these studies suggest that conceptual organisation seems to be free from the effect of grammatical gender and that ways of accessing cognitive representations differ with the modalities tested and with the demands of the task

Input and Intake in Language Acquisition

This dissertation presents an approach for a productive way forward in the study of language acquisition, sealing the rift between claims of an innate linguistic hypothesis space and powerful domain general statistical inference. This approach breaks language acquisition into its component parts, distinguishing the input in the environment from the intake encoded by the learner, and looking at how a statistical inference mechanism, coupled with a well defined linguistic hypothesis space could lead a learn to infer the native grammar of their native language. This work draws on experimental work, corpus analyses and computational models of Tsez, Norwegian and English children acquiring word meanings, word classes and syntax to highlight the need for an appropriate encoding of the linguistic input in order to solve any given problem in language acquisition