Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003

Abstract

Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003Abstract: In this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammatical gender . The researchers claim that speakers associated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary considerably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

“…Care must be taken when attempting to interpret parameter patterns from only a handful of studies, where settings can be entirely confounded with individual articles. Overall, priming offered a 34% support rate (Bender et al, 2011;Sato & Athanasopoulos, 2018) and a 66% nosupport rate (Bender et al, 2011;Degani, 2007;Mickan et al, 2014;Samuel et al, 2016). There were no cases of mixed classifications.…”

“…A further 23% were classified as providing mixed support; reasons were the finding that results were more consistent with grammatical gender in one group than another (that spoke a different language), but apparently not more so than chance itself (Haertlé, 2017); results limited to one property but not another, despite evidence that both were linked to biological sex (Konishi, 1993); evidence to suggest an effect of the grammatical gender of a language the participants did not speak, with no direct comparison of this effect with the language they did speak (Sedlmeier, Tipandjan, & Jänchen, 2016); and effects limited to second-and thirdchoice, but not first-choice, adjectives (Semenuks et al, 2017). The remaining 75% of samples offered cases of no support at all (Flaherty, 2001;Imai et al, 2014;Landor, 2014;Mickan, Schiefke, & Stefanowitsch, 2014;Montefinese et al, 2019;Semenuks et al, 2017). It should be noted that the study by Montefinese et al represents an extreme outlier.…”

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

“…Despite arbitrary gender assignment, evidence suggests that grammatical gender can affect the way people think about objects. For example, when asked to describe an object, Spanish and German speakers are more likely to ascribe stereotypically male qualities to objects with masculine grammatical gender, and stereotypically female qualities to objects with feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003; but see Mickan, Schiefke, & Stefanowitsch, 2014). Grammatical gender can even affect the way people remember complex fragrances: fragrances are remembered better when the grammatical gender of ingredients in the fragrance match the gender of the person the fragrance is marketed towards (Speed & Majid, 2019).…”

Extending research on the influence of grammatical gender on object classification: A cross-linguistic study comparing Estonian, Italian and Lithuanian native speakers

“…In Experiment 2, where subjects were asked to write 3 English adjectives to describe English words labelling the same object as in the first experiment, participants tended to use more masculine adjectives when the object had a masculine grammatical gender (for instance, Spanish speakers tended to describe a bridge as strong, while German speakers tended to describe it as elegant). It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mickan et al (2014) have recently failed to replicate a follow-up of this study and suggested that it could be either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or "a statistical fluke". tested Spanish and German speakers in a picture similarity task.…”