Does Grammatical Gender Influence Perception? A Study of Polish and French Speakers

Abstract

Can the perception of a word be influenced by its grammatical gender? Can it happen that speakers of one language perceive an object to have masculine features, while speakers of another language perceive the same object to have feminine features? Previous studies suggest that this is the case, and also that there is some supra-language gender categorisation of objects as natural/feminine and artefact/masculine. This study was an attempt to replicate these findings on another population of subjects. This is the first Polish study of this kind, comparing the perceptions of objects by Polish-and French-speaking individuals. The results of this study show that grammatical gender may cue people to assess objects as masculine or feminine. However, the findings of some previous studies, that feminine features are more often ascribed to natural objects than artifacts, were not replicated.

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

“…Only 3% of samples were classified as offering support (Flaherty, 2001;Imai et al, 2014;Saalbach et al, 2012). 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).…”

“…The voice choice paradigm, although the most common experimental task for researchers, is the second most commonly performed by participants in the field, accounting for 28% of all samples. 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).…”

Grammatical Gender Influences Semantic Categorization and Implicit Cognition in Polish

“…For example, numerous studies which used categorization tasks provided evidence that grammatical gender effects occur only in languages with two grammatical genders, such as Arabic (Clarke et al, 1981), Italian (Vigliocco et al, 2005), French and Spanish (Sera et al, 2002), and not in languages with more than two grammatical genders, such as German (Sera et al, 2002; Vigliocco et al, 2005). On the other hand, there is existing research in Polish – a language with more than two grammatical genders – in which grammatical gender effects were found (Ra̧czaszek-Leonardi, 2011; Haertlé, 2017).…”

“…There are few empirical studies on the influence of grammatical gender on cognition in Polish (Ra̧czaszek-Leonardi, 2011; Haertlé, 2017). The primary goal of our research was to further investigate the effects of grammatical gender in Polish.…”

“…There are also studies on assigning stereotypically masculine/feminine qualities and grammatical gender in the Polish language. Haertlé (2017) investigated the effect of grammatical gender on the perception of objects in Polish and French speakers [following up on studies by Sera et al (1994) and Boroditsky and Phillips (2003)]. In the first experiment, Haertlé presented a small group of native Polish and French speakers with images of objects and asked them to give these objects a male or a female voice for an upcoming cartoon.…”