INFLUENCE OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER ON DEDUCTIVE REASONING ABOUT SEX-SPECIFIC PROPERTIES OF ANIMALS

INFLUENCE OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER ON DEDUCTIVE REASONING ABOUT SEX-SPECIFIC PROPERTIES OF ANIMALS Mutsumi Imai (imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp) Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University at Shonan-Fujisawa, Japan Lennart Schalk (schalk@ifv.gess.ethz.ch) Institute for Behavioral Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Henrik Saalbach (saalbach@ifv.gess.ethz.ch) Institute for Behavioral Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Hiroyuki Okada (h.okada@eng.tamagawa.ac.jp) Department of Engineering, Tamagawa University, Japan Abstract Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., a male giraffe is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender classes. This research investigated whether this apparent motivation in mapping between grammar and biological sex affects deductive inference in German speakers. We identified two contexts in which speakers unconsciously over-generalize the grammar-semantics mapping to make inappropriate deductive inferences about sex-specific biological properties. They tended to erroneously accept deductions when the sex in the premise and the grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. The sex-gender agreement affected the inference even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated (e.g., die [FEM] mannliche (male) Giraffe). Experiment 2 further suggested that these effects occur only when the gender- marking article accompanied the noun. Implications of the results for lintuistic relativity is discussed. Keywords: Add your choice of indexing terms or keywords; kindly use a semi-colon; between each term. Introduction Many languages of the world have a system of grammatical gender, where nouns are assigned to one of the limited number of gender classes (Corbett & Fraser, 2000). Unlike languages that mark gender only semantically (e.g., English), languages with grammatical gender assign gender to all nouns regardless of whether or not referents have a biological sex. The link between gender assignment and conceptual properties of non-human referents has widely been said to be arbitrary (Aikhenvald, 2000; Fox, 1990), as grammatical gender is not relevant to biological sex for a majority of words. For example, in German, the word giraffe is grammatically feminine and elephant is masculine, but it is not the case that all giraffes are female or that all elephants are male. Nonetheless, the feminine article die ( [FEM] ) must be applied when one refers to a grammatically feminine noun and the feminine pronoun sie must be used as an anaphoric reference, whether the referent is biologically female or male (e.g., die mannliche (male) Giraffe). Here, an interesting question is to what extent speakers are able to separate the biological sex of an animal from its grammatical gender. From the perspective of a speaker of language without grammatical gender, it appears confusing that one has to use the feminine article and the female pronoun even when the giraffe is actually male. Of course, speakers of a language with the grammatical gender system must know that grammatical gender does not directly reflect biological sex. However, are the speakers completely immune to the influence of grammatical gender when they draw inferences about the animal’s sex-specific biological properties? It is possible that the few cases of semantic correspondence between grammatical gender and biological sex may have resulted in an overgeneralization during the process of language acquisition. In German, for example, salient female terms such as woman, lady, mother are grammatically feminine, while salient male terms such as man, boy, father, are grammatically masculine (Natural Sex Principle, cf. Zubin & Koepcke, 1986). Thus, speakers may falsely generalize this exceptional mapping between gender class and biological sex to words for animated entities in general. This assumption is consistent with Vigliocco and colleagues’ (Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, & Dworzynski, 2005) sex-and-gender- hypothesis, which proposes that a conceptual influence of grammatical gender originates in speakers’ first noticing the correspondence between grammatical classes and corresponding conceptual classes. In other words, acknowledging the link between biological sex and the grammatical gender class in the case of some salient human- specific terms leads speakers to develop a general anticipation that even non-human animals from the same grammatical gender class are more similar to one another than animals from different grammatical gender classes. Most of the previous research has asked whether and to what extent grammatical gender influences speakers’ concepts of entities in terms of typically feminine/masculine attributes assigned to those entities. Konishi (1993) looked at how Spanish and German speakers construe femininity or masculinity of non-animal objects by having them give gender-related ratings of various nouns on a potency scale