Grammatical Gender Influences Semantic Categorization and Implicit Cognition in Polish

Abstract

The influence of grammatical gender on cognitive processes is an important issue in contemporary psycholinguistics and language psychology, particularly in research concerning the relations between grammar and semantics. The extent of this effect is dependent on a given language’s gender system and its grammatical specifics. The aim of the presented research was to investigate grammatical gender effects in Polish – a Slavic language with three singular and two plural grammatical genders. In Experiment 1, triadic similarity judgments were used, and it turned out that the grammatical gender of nouns influenced perceived similarity of words in case of animals, but not inanimate objects or abstract concepts. In Experiment 2 we used a modified Implicit Association Test; results suggest that grammatical gender seems to be of implicit nature, as grammatical gender consistency influenced reaction times and the number of classification errors. In Experiment 3 participants assigned male and female voices to animals and inanimate objects, which were presented either as words or as pictures. Grammatical gender effects occurred for both animate and inanimate objects and were similar for verbal and visual stimuli. It turned out that in the Polish language the influence of grammatical gender may occur on the lexicosemantic level and the conceptual level, and concerns both animate and inanimate objects. Results are discussed in context of the similarity and gender and the sex and gender hypotheses.

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