Language and Culture Effects on Gender Classification of Objects

Abstract

The present studies test whether French grammatical gender affects bilingual children's classification of objects as boys or girls in English, in children aged 3 to 5 years (Study 1) and aged 8 to 10 years (Study 2), compared to monolingual children to control for possible cultural biases. In both studies, children tended to classify more objects as boys than as girls. In Study 1, the bilingual children showed a reduced boy bias relative to monolinguals. Only the older children showed a by-object effect of French gender. The bilinguals' and monolinguals' classifications were highly correlated. In Study 3, English-speaking adults classified object names as boys or girls. The adults' classifications were highly correlated with the children's. The authors argue that the classification of objects by gender is affected by cultural biases as well as knowledge of French. The effect of French knowledge is modified by age.Many researchers have argued that the habitual use of a language can influence adults' thinking

Is grammatical gender considered arbitrary or semantically motivated? Evidence from young adult monolinguals, second language learners, and early bilinguals

“…Evidence of weaker effects of grammatical gender on the evaluation task is in line with previous findings that bilingualism mitigates grammatical gender effects on behavioural tasks such as voice and name assignment (Bassetti, 2007;Forbes et al, 2008;Kurinski & Sera, 2011;Nicoladis & Foursha-Stevenson, 2012) and in semantic differential tasks (Bassetti, 2011;Lambelet, 2012). Non-monolinguals consider the grammatical gender assignments of their L1 as less appropriate, compared with monolingual peers.…”

“…While monolingual children prefer female voices for artefacts whose noun is grammatically feminine, there is no such preference in bilingual children whose second language assigns opposite gender to the same entity (Bassetti, 2007). Finally, bilingualism may also induce a bias in the perception of masculinity and femininity that is absent in monolingual peers: English-French bilingual children classify objects and animals as 'boys' or 'girls' in line with their French grammatical gender, whereas English monolingual peers do not show this bias (Nicoladis & Foursha-Stevenson, 2012); L2 Spanish grammatical gender affects performance in voice attribution tasks in English-Spanish bilinguals (Forbes et al, 2008), and just 10 weeks of instruction in L2 Spanish gender assignment can affect voice attributions in English native speakers (Kurinski & Sera, 2011). Using a semantic differential task, Bassetti (2011) found that bilinguals with two grammatical gender languages are less affected by L1 grammatical gender in rating animals on potency scales, compared with monolinguals (see also Lambelet, 2012).…”

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

“…However, in order to assess the relative strength of grammatical gender, it is also necessary to consider perceptual features and -most importantly -cultural factors (Nicoladis, Fourscha-Stevenson 2011). Needless to say, objects such as knife, helicopter, telescope and wheel are quite different from objects such as chair and cap: while all objects are artifacts, the first group has arguably stronger associations with men.…”

“…In British English, for instance, it is not unusual to refer to a ship as she and to a computer as he. Such usage is well documented and described in the literature as "opaque gender" (Flaherty 2001, Nicoladis, Fourscha-Stevenson 2011. In Estonian, such usage is not possible because the same third person pronoun (tema, short form: ta) is used to refer to both men and women (this pronoun is used mostly to refer to animate beings, but it is occasionally used to refer to inanimate objects).…”

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

“…Second, despite being essentially unpublished (except for the sketchy description in Boroditsky et al 2003), the study has recently been widely cited as evidence for linguistic relativity in research articles (e.g. Percy et al 2009;Fenko et al 2010;Chen and Su 2011;Cubelli et al 2011;Nicoladis and Foursha-Stevenson 2012;Vuksanović et al in press) as well as encyclopedic overviews (e.g. Boroditsky 2006; Reines and Prinz 2009).…”