Abstract
This paper describes a study conducted recently at the University of Colorado to investigate one aspect of the “Whorf‐Sapir hypothesis” of linguistic relativity. The study was a replication of a series of investigations conducted by the University of Michigan Personality and Language Behavior Research Group (Beit‐Hallahmi et al. 1974, Guiora and Sagi 1978, Guiora and Acton 1979, Guiora et al., in press) designed to examine the relationship between gender loading in languages (a linguistic construct) and perception/development of gender (a psychological construct) by speakers of those languages. The results of those studies indicated that adult speakers of English, Finnish, and Hebrew categorized objectsjconcepts in essentially the same fashion regardless of native language. The results of the present study, whiledecidedly tentative, indicate that Arabic speaking adults categorize “essentially asexual” objects/concepts in a markedly different way from English speaking adults, indicating that gender loading in Arabic influences Arabic speakers' perceptions of those objects/concepts. These findings run contrary to the results obtained from previous studies. Theoretical and methodological issues are discussed and suggestions are made for further research in this area.
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