How Persistent are Grammatical Gender Effects? The Case of German and Tamil.

Abstract

Does the language we speak shape the way we think? The present research concentrated on the impact of grammatical gender on cognition and examined the persistence of the grammatical gender effect by (a) concentrating on German, a three-gendered language, for which previous results have been inconsistent, (b) statistically controlling for common alternative explanations, (c) employing three tasks that differed in how closely they are associated with grammatical gender, and (d) using Tamil, a nongendered language, as a baseline for comparison. We found a substantial grammatical gender effect for two commonly used tasks, even when alternative explanations were statistically controlled for. However, there was basically no effect for a task that was only very loosely connected to grammatical gender (similarity rating of word pairs). In contrast to previous studies that found effects of the German and Spanish grammatical gender in English (a nongendered language), our study did not produce such effects for Tamil, again after controlling for alternative explanations, which can be taken as additional evidence for the existence of a purely linguistic grammatical gender effect. These results indicate that general grammatical gender effects exist but that the size of these effects may be limited and their range restricted.