Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

Samuel, Steven; Cole, Geoff G.; Eacott, Madeline J.

doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01652-3

Cited by 36 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…It is known that when a noun is comprehended, corresponding grammatical information is activated (Meyer, Belke, Telling, & Humphreys, 2007;Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003). It is therefore possible that previous effects are due to grammatical activation, rather than reflecting conceptual similarities between objects sharing a classifier (a similar proposal has been made for effects of grammatical gender; Ramos & Roberson, 2011;Samuel et al, 2019;Vigliocco et al, 2005). Specifically, if two objects are labeled by participants and this activates the same grammatical marker, they may be judged as more similar.…”

Section: Classifiers Rflect Conceptual Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

Speed¹,

Chen²,

Huettig³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Do we structure object-related conceptual information according to real-world sensorimotor experience, or can it also be shaped by linguistic information? This study investigates whether a feature of language coded in grammar-numeral classifiers-affects the conceptual representation of objects. We compared speakers of Mandarin (a classifier language) with speakers of Dutch (a language without classifiers) on how they judged object similarity in four studies. In the first three studies, participants had to rate how similar a target object was to four comparison objects, one of which shared a classifier with the target. Objects were presented as either words or pictures. Overall, the target object was always rated as most similar to the object with the shared classifier, but this was the case regardless of the language of the participant. In a final study employing a successive pile-sorting task, we also found that the underlying object concepts were similar for speakers of Mandarin and Dutch. Speakers of a non-classifier language are therefore sensitive to the same conceptual similarities that underlie classifier systems in a classifier language. Classifier systems may therefore reflect conceptual structure, rather than shape it.

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Section: Classifiers Rflect Conceptual Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

Speed¹,

Chen²,

Huettig³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, Spanish and French adults and children tend to assign feminine and masculine voices to objects according to the grammatical gender of the objects in their native languages (Sera et al, 2002), and Spanish and German speakers remember noun-object pairings better when the noun of the object matches the grammatical gender of the object in their language (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003). A recent systematic review of the literature on grammatical gender and linguistic relativity suggests that grammatical gender effects on thought are task-specific and modulated by several factors (Samuel, Cole, & Eacott, 2019).…”

Section: I S G E N D E R a N Abstract C O N C E P T ?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender is a multifaceted concept: evidence that specific life experiences differentially shape the concept of gender

et al. 2020

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Gender has been the focus of linguistic and psychological studies, but little is known about its conceptual representation. We investigate whether the conceptual structure of gender – as expressed in participants’ free-listing responses – varies according to gender-related experiences in line with research on conceptual flexibility. Specifically, we tested groups that varied by gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender-normativity. We found that different people stressed distinct aspects of the concept. For example, normative individuals mainly relied on a bigenderist conception (e.g., male/female; man/woman), while non-normative individuals produced more aspects related to social context (e.g., queer, fluidity, construction). At a broader level, our results support the idea that gender is a multifaceted and flexible concept, constituted by social, biological, cultural, and linguistic components. Importantly, the meaning of gender is not exhausted by the classical dichotomy opposing sex, a biological fact, with gender as its cultural counterpart. Instead, both aspects are differentially salient depending on specific life experiences.

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“…Specifically, we predicted that there would be no age-related differences in performance between the two groups, because in children with DLD, language impairment has usually been found to be only marginally related to age (Leonard, 2014). In addition, we believe research on grammatical gender representation across languages is a timely and under investigated research topic that deserves attention (see the recent review by Samuel et al, 2019).…”

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

Artuso

Fratini

Belacchi

2021

J Psycholinguist Res

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Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) display impaired phonological and/or morpho-syntactic skills. To detect these impairments, it would be of value to devise tasks that assess specific markers of implicit linguistic competence. We administered a forced choice semantic categorization task developed in Italian (Belacchi and Cubelli in Journal of psycholinguistic research 41:295–310, 2012) for detecting the implicit use of grammatical gender markers in classifying epicenes names of animals: phonological and/or syntactic. Seventy Italian children with expressive-phonological DLD (mean age: 61.20 months) were compared with a same-size control group. Overall, the children with DLD performed more poorly than the control group. Also, the DLD participants used the phonological index to a significantly lesser extent, confirming their specific impairment in the phonological processing of words. The current study provided evidence for the status of phonological discrimination skills as a precursor of language development, and the value of using categorization tasks to assess implicit linguistic competence in children with DLD.

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Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

Cited by 36 publications

References 73 publications

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

Classifier categories reflect but do not affect conceptual organization.

Gender is a multifaceted concept: evidence that specific life experiences differentially shape the concept of gender

Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

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