Previous work shows that a lot of different languages have different grammatical gender rules, which though looks arbitrary on the face of it, do appear to have a close link with perception of objects when researched in detail. For example, inanimate objects that are assigned masculine gender often are perceived to be strong or wild while those assigned feminine gender are perceived to be soft and homely.These perceptions though can vary from language to language. For example, the sun is predominantly characterized with masculine properties like power and courage it is considered as male in hindi. "Suraj ugta hai". However contrastingly in German "sun" is considered as female perhaps because of its warm n nurturative characteristics.
Grammatical gender is a method of personification and it influences the thought process of the individual speaking that particular language. For example, children's text books and animated films etc consistently stick to the defined genders of objects according to grammatical gender rules. Linguistic categories can subconsciously affect people's judgement by making them carry out comparisons that they otherwise would never have.
Thus the study of grammatical gender in different languages is an interesting way to look at varied percepion of objects and concepts across cultures. We can determine how grammar rules vary from language to language and this has a pronounced effect on the thought process of people speaking that language. Observing this effect on bilinguals is yet another interesting variation in this study. Thus if we test people who are fluent in two languages, one of which is gendered and the other non gendered, we can test how their knowledge of the gendered language can influence their performance of a task in the non-gendered language, thus reflecting how it influences their thought process.
In this project I will be conducting 3 experiments which are duplications of experiments conducted by Boroditsky, Schmidt and Philips for their paper Sex, Syntax and Semantics.
Three groups of people are taken. Group 1 having individuals fluent in English and another non gendered language. Group 2 having individuals fluent in English and Hindi. Group 3 having individuals fluent in English and another language that is gendered differently as compared to Hindi, like French.
Every group is shown a set of objects and each object is denoted an English name. The test subjects are later tested on their memory of the names of corresponding objects with special concern for whether the gender of the object in their alternate language in any way assists their memory of a name for their object in English.
The same 3 groups of people are shown a set of objects and asked to write down the first three English adjectives that come into their mind on seeing each objective. This would enable us t find out if grammatical gender influences their perception of the objects.
An arificial language is developed where in feminine words are referred to as soupative and masculine ones as oosative. To teach this to the test subjects they are shown a two sets of objects, one soupative which would contain pictures of females along with some other random inanimate sexless objects and the other oosative containing pictures of males along with some random inanimate sexless objects. Following this they are asked to again write down the first three English adjectives that come to their minds after seeing one random object from the two lists shown. This would serve to test whether grammatical gender in a language can actually exert causal power over the information processing ability of people.
According to the previous works the expected outcomes of these experiments should be suggestive of a covert connection between perception of objects and their grammatical gender. Previous works have shown that grammatical gender often governs thought by compelling people to make comparisons between objects belonging to the same category which they would perhaps otherwise not have done. These experiments should serve to reiterate this claim.
1. Boroditsky, et al. Sex, Syntax and Semantics. In: Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61– 80. Cambridge University Press
2. Konishi Toshi. The Semantics of Grammatical Gender: A cross-cultural study.1993, Journal of psycholinguistic research, Vol 22, unit 5.