Culture or language: what drives effects of grammatical gender?

Abstract

Although investigations of linguistic relativity originated in cultural anthropology, the role of culture in the interplay of language and cognition has rarely been addressed. The debate on whether the grammatical gender of nouns affects how people represent the entity denoted by the respective noun is a typical example of this. A common research strategy has been to compare the gender associations for non-animate entities as a function of their grammatical gender between two languages spoken in different cultural groups. In the study reported here, we try to disentangle linguistic and cultural effects on such gender associations, by focusing on members of one cultural group speaking two language variants that differ in whether or not they distinguish masculine and feminine gender. Participants were asked to assign a male or female voice to nouns from a broad range of semantic categories (animates, allegories and artefacts). Our findings indicate that the gender system does indeed have an impact on voice assignment. However, this grammatical effect is small compared to the variation induced by culturally conveyed associations within and across the semantic domains. In conclusion, we discuss some implications and guidelines for future research on how to control for culture as a problematic confound in cross-linguistic studies.

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

“…3 Not all two-gendered languages divide nouns into masculine and feminine; some (like Dutch, Swedish, and some Norwegian dialects) instead divide nouns into "gendered" and "neuter" categories. To our knowledge, only one study in our review included participants who spoke a language of this type: Bergensk, a language spoken in Norway (Beller, Brattebø, Lavik, Reigstad, & Bender, 2015). For the purposes of the review, we excluded the results of this study from our two-versus three-gender comparison.…”

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

“…Languages like Dutch, Swedish, and parts of Norwegian, by contrast, distinguish one gender common for (formerly) masculine and feminine nouns from the neuter gender. In such cases, the three-gender language (variant) may exhibit a gender congruency effect, while the two-gender language (variant) does not (Beller, Brattebø, Lavik, Reigstad, & Bender, 2015).…”

“…As elaborated on in the introduction, connotations have been acknowledged, in theory, as a possibly powerful source of gender congruency (Bassetti, 2007(Bassetti, , 2014Beller et al, 2015;Flaherty, 2001;Guiora & Sagi, 1978;Kurinski & Sera, 2011). Whereas denotative meaning is part of a noun's content and hence should be shared by all speakers of a specific language, the connotative meaning may arise from a multitude of sources-including personal experiences, feelings, gender-related stereotypes, personified allegories, or cultural symbols-and hence varies across individual speakers (Cubelli et al, 2011;Nicoladis & Foursha-Stevenson, 2012).…”

Flexing Gender Perception: Brain Potentials Reveal the Cognitive Permeability of Grammatical Information

“…Why, then would grammatical gender congruency not be reflected in the behavioral measures? Previously, it has been argued that grammatical gender congruency effects are more likely to be observed in experimental paradigms using explicit measures (e.g., voice/sex attribution) as opposed to those using implicit paradigms such as ours (Beller, Brattebø, Lavik, Reigstad, & Bender, 2015). In fact, the absence of the grammatical gender congruency effect in the RT measures is reminiscent of the same lack of effect in Boutonnet et al's (2012) behavioral measures.…”