Cross-Cultural Analysis of Prototypicality Norms Used by Male and Female Persian and American Speakers.

Abstract

Human beings generally cut the realities of the world in various ways in order to express their thoughts and interact with other people. Naturally, words are linguistic categories which carry the intended concepts; however, humans tend to economize by bundling words into different conceptual classes. Accordingly, the present study sought to explore the prototypicality norms used by male and female Persian and American speakers adopting a cross cultural analysis. For this purpose, from the existing prototypes, four conceptual categories; namely, vehicles, vegetables, furniture, and clothes were randomly selected and used as the tertium comparationis for determining the way 120 male and female monolingual American and Persian speakers, sixty from each language, ranked the category membership of different conceptual members belonging to the targeted prototypes. The analysis of the obtained data based on participants' ranking of the prototypes along with the respective frequency values revealed that gender and culture played a significant role in identifying the category membership of various members of a given concept across different languages. The findings can have important implications for language teachers, material designers, and second language students since culture is an overriding factor in language learning.