How does language affect thought? Do the grammatical structures of the language we speak influence the way we think about objects and ideas? The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) proposes that the specific language we speak affects the way we think about reality. Predictions made under this hypothesis (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003) posit that grammatical gender is an example of a linguistic structure that affects other aspects of thought. Specifically, because speakers of languages like Spanish denote a grammatical gender to every noun, including those with inanimate referents, this systematic distinction is thought to become part of the meaning representation of objects. Under this hypothesis, pairs of words that match in grammatical gender would be considered as more similar in meaning than pairs that do not share a gender. In four experiments we examined the role of grammatical gender, as well as biological gender, as an organizing dimension of the semantic representation of speakers of Spanish and English. With respect to biological gender, as denoted by English, we found that native English speakers consider pairs of words that share a biological gender (e.g., queen-cow) to be more similar in meaning than pairs that do not share a gender (e.g., king-waitress) (Experiment 1). However, match in biological gender was not sufficient to produce a priming effect in a lexical decision task (Experiment 4). With respect to grammatical gender, as denoted by Spanish, we found that in contrast to the predictions made under the linguistic relativity hypothesis, pairs that match in grammatical gender (e.g., 'camisa' (f) - 'mesa' (f), shirt-table respectively) did not elicit higher semantic similarity ratings by native Spanish speakers compared to unmatched pairs (Experiment 2), and furthermore these pairs were not processed more quickly or accurately in a primed naming task (Experiments 3A and 3B). We discuss the theoretical and practical considerations that may underlie these effects
