Gender congruency from a neutral point of view: The roles of gender classes and conceptual connotations.

Abstract

The question of whether language affects thought is long-standing, with grammatical gender being one of the most contended instances. Empirical evidence focuses on the gender congruency effect, according to which referents of masculine nouns are conceptualized more strongly as male and those of feminine nouns more strongly as female. While some recent studies suggest that this effect is driven by conceptual connotations rather than grammatical properties, research remains theoretically inconclusive because of the confounding of grammatical gender and conceptual connotations in gendered (masculine or feminine) nouns. Taking advantage of the fact that German also includes a neuter gender, the current study attempted to disentangle the relative contributions of grammatical properties and connotations to the emergence of the gender congruency effect. In three pairs of experiments, neuter and gendered nouns were compared in an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task based on gender associations, controlled for a possible role of gender-indicating articles. A congruency effect emerged equally strongly for neuter and gendered nouns, but disappeared when including connotations as covariate, thereby effectively excluding grammatical gender as the (only) driving force for this effect. Based on a critical discussion of these findings, we propose a possible mechanism for the emergence of the effect that also has the potential to accommodate conflicting patterns of findings from previous research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

“…Crossreferencing these results back to the original stimuli, no evidence of property judgments consistent with grammatical gender was found. Absences of evidence have also been reported in sex assignment tasks (Nicoladis & Foursha-Stevenson, 2012), similarity tasks (Degani, 2007), the EAST (Bender et al, 2018), and priming-type tasks (e.g., Degani, 2007;Samuel, Roehr-Brackin, & Roberson, 2016). The importance of these findings is that they might delineate important constraints on the relativity hypothesis that, as we discussed earlier, would be a finding consistent with the majority of theoretical standpoints in the contemporary literature.…”

“…Of these, 64% were classified as offering support (Almutrafi, 2015;Athanasopoulos & Boutonnet, 2016;Beller et al, 2015;Bender et al, 2016a;Haertlé, 2017;Kurinski et al, 2016;Lambelet, 2016;Ramos & Roberson, 2011;Sera et al, 1994;Sera et al, 2002;Vernich, 2017;Vernich, Argus, & Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, 2017). An additional 22% were classified as providing mixed support; these included results consistent with the hypothesis but limited to one of two genders (Bassetti, 2007), effects for limited subsets of targets (Beller et al, 2015;Bender et al, 2016a), and statistically marginal results (Bender et al, 2018). Mixed results also included cases in which the data suggested that voice choices were not more consistent with grammatical gender than chance levels (Forbes, Poulin-Dubois, Rivero, & Sera, 2008;Sera et al, 2002), and effects limited to native speakers but not learners (including advanced learners 6 ) of the same language (Kurinski & Sera, 2011).…”

“…Under such conditions, the chances of grammatical gender being consciously recruited are increased, potentially undermining a conceptual change account. A number of scholars have raised this issue (e.g., Bender, Beller, & Klauer, 2011;Bender et al, 2018;Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2008;Pavlidou & Alvanoudi, 2013;Ramos & Roberson, 2011), and Phillips and Boroditsky (2003) have suggested that it is difficult to resolve empirically. For instance, in Study 2 of Sera et al (1994), reference to "masculine" and "feminine" was removed from the instructions from the previous experiment, but participants were nevertheless still required to assign male or female voices.…”

“…A crucial question that underpins everything in this review concerns the nature of grammatical gender itself. It has been pointed out that the "gender" in grammatical gender is not intrinsic to language but is itself an arbitrary, human-made label (Bender et al, 2018). At some point in their lives, speakers of gendered languages usually learn that the names for the categories are "masculine" and "feminine," but would they ever choose those names without formal instruction?…”

“…One aspect of grammar that has received attention in recent years is grammatical gender (Bassetti & Nicoladis, 2016;Bender, Beller, & Klauer, 2018). Unlike English, which has a semantic (or conceptual) gender system whereby the gender of a noun is dictated by its biological sex, many languages have a formal system by which all nouns are assigned to a grammatical gender category whether they have biological sex or not.…”