Grammatical gender and anthropomorphism: “It” depends on the language.

Abstract

When English speakers anthropomorphize animals or objects, they refer to such entities using human pronouns (e.g., he or she instead of it). Unlike English, which marks gender only for humans, gendered languages such as French grammatically mark gender not only for humans but also for nonhumans. Research has shown that in gendered languages, although gender marking of nonhuman nouns is semantically arbitrary, people ascribe male and female properties to nonhuman entities consistent with their grammatical gender. Because grammatical gender conveys human-related properties, we question whether grammatically gender-marking nonhumans may elicit anthropomorphism tendencies. Across six studies, we show that gender marking of nonhuman nouns in gendered languages influences the way individuals mentally represent these entities and increases their anthropomorphism tendencies. We demonstrate the effects both by comparing anthropomorphism as a function of natural differences in languages with French-English bilinguals (Study 1) and by training native English speakers to use gender marking for nonhuman nouns as speakers of gendered languages do (Study 2). The following studies further demonstrate the effects within the French language by measuring (Study 3a) and manipulating (Studies 3b and 4) the salience of gender markings of nonhuman nouns. In Study 5 (preregistered), we replicate our basic finding and establish grammatical gender as an important linguistic element in shaping French speakers' anthropomorphism tendencies. We discuss the findings and the limitations in the culturelanguage-cognition triad and layout their implications for the debate on the extent to which language can mediate categorical and perceptual judgments.

Across-language masculinity of oceans and femininity of guitars: Exploring grammatical gender universalities

“…According to a recent systematic survey of 43 pieces of experimental research on grammatical gender and linguistic relativity, such divergence of findings reflects that the influence of grammatical gender on concepts is “strongly task- and context-dependent” ( Samuel et al, 2019 , p. 1784). This explanation likely accounts for the apparent conflict between failings to replicate the widely cited results obtained by Boroditsky et al (2003) (Elpers et al, 2022 ), and the contemporaneous studies completing Boroditsky’s findings ( Williams et al, 2021 ; Mecit et al, 2022 ); the latter attest that grammatical gender does influence how individuals mentally represent objects of reality, thus shaping anthropomorphism tendencies. The field’s state-of -the-art, undoubtedly, indicates the necessity for more profound investigation.…”

Is That “Mr.” or “Ms.” Lemon? An Investigation of Grammatical and Semantic Gender on the Perception of Household Odorants

“…Although a number of studies have examined speakers’ perceptions of physical objects, very few have considered whether bilingual speakers tested in English describe non-spatial objects such as odorants in a way that reflects the grammatical gender of their native language (similar to the findings of Boroditsky et al [ 25 ] for physical objects), whether the gender specifier acts as a prime for the concepts of masculinity or femininity [ 45 ], or whether such speakers personify the odors in the same way as others in their culture. People are easily able to classify odorants by gender [ 46 , 47 ].…”

Letter to the editor

“…Anthropomorphism is commonly defined as "imbuing imagined or real behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions and emotions." 1,2,5 Simply ascribing an action to a nonhuman agent (in this case, the study, or results) does not meet these criteria. Firstly, these verbs do not describe exclusively human actions.…”