Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers

Sera, Maria D.; Berge, Christian A.H.; Pintado, Javier del Castillo

doi:10.1016/0885-2014(94)90007-8

Cited by 135 publications

(229 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This finding argues against a view such as the one proposed by Sera et al (1994), according to which even arbitrary lexico-syntactic features such as grammatical gender, once learned, become part of the lexico-semantic specification of a word. Second, our results provide some initial, novel information concerning the way in which activation flows between lexicosemantic and lexico-syntactic representations.…”

Section: The Representation and Retrieval Of Lexico-semantic And Lexicontrasting

confidence: 50%

“…On the basis of this correspondence between speakers' semantic ratings and the grammatical gender of nouns, Konishi argued that grammatical gender is intimately related to the conceptual representation for the words. Along similar lines, Sera et al (1994) showed that grammatical gender is used in another semantic task, such as attributing a male or a female voice to a nonsexuated entity. In these studies it was found that although both younger (4-year-old) speakers of Spanish (a gender-marked language) and of English used a semantic criterion such as animacy in their attributions, older children and adult speakers of English continued to use animacy in their attributions, whereas speakers of Spanish used grammatical gender in addition.…”

Section: The Relationship Between Lexico-semantic and Lexicosyntacticmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Vigliocco¹,

Lauer²,

Damian³

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of phrases in Dutch. Bilingual participants were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an adjective ϩ noun phrase in Dutch including the translation of the noun. In 2 experiments, the authors blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender. Participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories and faster when the target nouns had the same gender than when they had different genders. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed. The authors replicated the results of the first 2 experiments, and no interaction was found. These findings suggest a feedforward flow of activation between lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information.Speaking involves the retrieval of lexical representations that correspond to our intentions and the development of a syntactically well-formed frame for the to-be-uttered sentence. The development of such a frame is, in part, guided by syntactic information specific to each word: for example, a word's grammatical category, the subcategorization requirements of verbs, and a noun's gender (for languages such as Dutch). The focus of this article is on the relationship between retrieving a lexical representation that specifies the meaning the speaker wants to convey and retrieving the associated lexico-syntactic information.Across languages, lexico-syntactic properties of words are often linked to lexico-semantic properties. For example, for grammatical class, the semantic distinction between objects, actions, and properties corresponds to a syntactic distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The semantic dimension of biological gender corresponds to the syntactic distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, and the semantic distinction between entities that can be counted and substances is captured by the syntactic distinction between count and mass nouns. The existence of such correspondencies between the semantic and the syntactic dimensions has been taken by some authors as indicating a conceptual foundation for the syntactic distinctions (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1982;Langacker, 1987). However, these correspondencies between semantic and syntactic properties are limited, to an important extent. With respect to grammatical class, actions (e.g., "to bomb") can also be denoted by nouns (e.g., bombardment). In a number of languages, gender of nouns is not only a property of nouns referring to entities but also of nouns referring to objects and abstract entities for which there is no clear semantic correlate. And, cases exist, in English for example, in which the distinction between count and mass nouns does not reflect the semantic distinction between entities that can be counted and substances (e.g., abstract nouns such as opinion and knowledge). The different degree of correspondence between lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic properties across languages and types ...

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Section: The Representation and Retrieval Of Lexico-semantic And Lexicontrasting

confidence: 50%

Section: The Relationship Between Lexico-semantic and Lexicosyntacticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Vigliocco¹,

Lauer²,

Damian³

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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show abstract

“…Recent systematic investigations of the relationship between language and thought have likewise provided evidence for both views. Differences between languages in grammatical structure and range of terminology have been associated with altered perceived similarity between objects and actions, as well as to different memories of the same experience in the following domains: number systems (Gumperz & Levinson, 1997); spatial relations (Levinson, 1996;Bowerman & Choi, 2001), artifact categories (Malt & Johnson, 1998); modes of motion (Gennari, et al, 2000); time (Boroditsky, 2001); material and shape classification (Lucy, 1992); shape (Roberson, Davidoff & Shapiro, 2002) and grammatical gender (Clarke et al, 1981(Clarke et al, , 1984Sera, Berge & Pintado, 1994;Sera et al, 2001, Boroditsky, in press). Other studies have argued against the influence of linguistic differences on perceptual classification, both at the level of terminology (Munnich & Landau, 2003;Malt et al, 1999) and grammatical structure (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Color categories 4 Pérez-Pereira, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

Roberson

Davidoff

Davies

et al. 2005

Cognitive Psychology

300

255

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The question of whether language affects our categorization of perceptual continua is of particular interest for the domain of color where constraints on categorization have been proposed both within the visual system and in the visual environment. Recent research Roberson et al., in press) found substantial evidence of cognitive color differences between different language communities, but concerns remained as to how representative might be a tiny, extremely remote community. The present study replicates and extends previous findings using additional paradigms among a larger community in a different visual environment. Adult semi-nomadic tribesmen in Southern Africa carried out similarity judgments, short-term memory and long-term learning tasks. They showed different cognitive organization of color to both English and another language with the five color terms. Moreover, Categorical Perception effects were found to differ even between languages with broadly similar color categories. The results provide further evidence of the tight relationship between language and cognition.

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“…In a study by Sera, Berge, & del Castillo Pintado (1994), Spanish and English speakers were asked to classify pictures of objects as masculine or feminine. The objects pictured either did or did not have a natural gender.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Haertlé

2017

Psychology of Language and Communication

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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.

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Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers

Cited by 135 publications

References 22 publications

Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

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

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