Grammatical gender and the conceptualisation of objects across five languages, SOAS
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 25/07/2016

https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This talk titled "Grammatical gender and the conceptualisation of objects across five languages" was given by Roland Landor (Griffith University) on 20 October 2015 at the Department of Linguistics, SOAS University of London
More about this event: https://goo.gl/U0fgnq
The aim of this study was to investigate the potential relationship between grammatical categories and cognition by examining whether grammatical gender affects the conceptualisation of objects. Though several studies have set out to investigate the potential relationship between grammatical gender and cognition, the results to date seem inconclusive and somewhat contradictory. In order to address the research question guiding this investigation, a three-phase experiment was designed to uncover and represent any potential differences and/or similarities in the ways in which the speakers of five different languages, with differing grammatical gender systems, conceptualise objects. The five selected languages, English, German, Hebrew, Hungarian and Spanish, represent three language families: IndoEuropean (Germanic and Romance), Uralic-Altaic (Finno-Ugric) and AfroAsiatic (Semitic). These languages provide the most comprehensive coverage to date of a gender loading scale that classifies languages according to the extent to which they oblige their speakers to be mindful of gender.

This study found no evidence of a positive correlation between grammatical gender and the conceptualisation of objects. In fact, the results suggest that grammatical gender may have a ‘clouding’ effect on gender-related conceptualisation, which appears to suppress the confidence with which participants ascribe gendered characteristics to objects.