Sex, Syntax, and Semantics is an 2003 article by Lera Boroditsky and Lauren A. Schmidt which is currently available via Google Scholar. I was recently referenced to Lera Boroditsky by the Beijing-based polymath David Moser, a former teacher of mine. This paper described two experiments which are broadly about psycholinguistics, and specifically about the effect of grammatical gender on the thoughts of individuals.
The first experiment is conducted with fifteen native English speakers who have no familiarity with either German or Spanish. The participants were presented with a range of items and animals that inherently had no biological gender, but in both German and Spanish shared a grammatical gender. Although the results were not overwhelming proof of a tight grammatical-gender relationship between the three languages, the results were definitely statistically significant. In the words of the authors, "these findings suggest that the grammatical genders assigned to animals may not have been entirely arbitrary, but rather may have reflected people’s perceptions of the particular animals as having stereotypically masculine or feminine properties." So although the relationship grammatical/percieved-biological gender may not be strict between these languages, the authors' hypothesis of grammatical gender not being entirely arbitrary seems to be supported. Just to dispel any doubt, I hereby declare to my dear readers (possibly just my dad), that linguistic grammar does have an affect on what I am calling the perceived biological grammar. One of the first studies on this was by Jackobson in 1966, in which speakers of Russian (a language with gendered nouns) were asked to personify nouns and "consistently personified the grammatically masculine days of the week (Mon-day, Tuesday, and Thursday) as males, and the grammati-cally feminine days of the week (Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) as females, though they could not explicitly say why they did so." Also, in studies in which Spanish speakers were asked to label inanimate (meaning: without biological gender) objects as as either masculine or feminine, the labels consistently matched the objects grammatical gender in Spanish.
The second study described in this paper involved a number of native Spanish speakers and a number of native German speakers, doing an memory exercise in English. This experiment also included a group of native English speakers. Objects with opposite grammatical gender in Spanish and German. The objects were also matched randomly with names that were either masculine or feminine (such as Alexander or Alexandra). The participants were shown a series of these object-name pairs to remember, given a short distraction exercise, and then tested on their memory of the object-name pairs. The results for the English speakers suggested strong support of the authors' hypothesis,as their ability to recall "object-name pairs [was] better when the gender of the proper name was consistent with the object’s rated gender (86% correct) than when the two genders were inconsistent (78% correct), t=2.17, p<.05." This suggests that people do include gender in their conceptual representations of inanimate objects. Furthermore, the native Spanish and the native German speakers showed a linguistic bias in the recollection of the object-name pairs, suggests that people’s ideas about the genders of objects, or how their perceptions of biological gender in inanimate objects, are strongly influenced by the grammatical genders assigned to those objects in their native language. This does a good deal of work to further disprove the long-lasting fallacy that "the assignment of grammatical gender to object names is semantically arbitrary, and has nothing to do with the conceptual properties of the referent." I vaguely recall hearing this in my high-school French class, and possibly in my college Spanish class as well. I have no doubt that this myth is written in many books, and here, as an aspiring linguist, I want to do my part to help dispel it.
Boroditsky and Schmidt write that "These results suggest that grammatical gender may not be as arbitrary or as purely grammatical as was previously thought." However, rather than attributing this to a universal human propensity for seeing certain objects as male and others as female, I would propose that the results of this test might possibly indicate an older historical root between English, German, and Spanish. Although English and Spanish share a great deal, and English and German isn't too old, the root between Spanish and German must be traced back considerably farther. They are, however, both Indo-European languages. The Indo-European language family as a category is perhaps so large as to potentially dilute it's meaning (what significance can it hold when it contains English, Italian, Russian, Urdu, Bengali, German, Marati {90 million speakers and I've never heard of it either!}, plus hundreds more languages and dialects?). However, there has also been some cultural and historic similarities in which the languages evolved over the past 1000 plus years. I am, unfortunately, not terribly familiar with the pre-Roman linguistic history in Europe, so I cannot speak as the history of 2000 and more years ago. Therefore, perhaps similar studies involving a more diverse variety of languages would be the next step. I would, of course, love to see what the results of studies like these would be with native speakers of Mandarin. But for the sake a diversity, perhaps something involving languages native to the Americas, something from the Sino-Tibetan language family, and some Afroasiatic languages. I know very little of these languages, but that it the whole point: as human beings, especially those of us who are scientific researchers, we need to be intensely aware of our own lackings in knowledge, even when we possess PhDs and an excellent reputation among peers. Boroditsky seems to be a keen academic here, as she does not declare any definitive reason, but merely describes the results of her experiment. I am glad to see this, as I have read too many academic papers in which the hopes and expectations that the author(s) put in their conclusions far outstrip the facts displayed in the paper. So perhaps a wider range could disprove the idea that grammatical gender is slightly shared between English, Spanish, and German through history, and therefore give either a stronger indication towards or a strong strike against the possibility that the perceived biological gender of objects is a universally inherently human concept.
I would highly recommend this fascinating article to anyone interested in linguistics or psycholinguistics. It is a quick read, too: excluding the citations, title page, and index, it is just five pages of text to read. Being freely available via Google Scholar makes it incredibly accessible too.
As a bit of self-reflection, I have to say that with my multilingual, intercultural, international view of the world, I have to admit that I am somewhat amazed that such large numbers of English speakers who lack even a passing familiarity with Spanish or German are still found in large numbers. It speaks to my own self-centered view of the world that all the citizens of the United States do not realize and embrace the relevance of Latin America and learn at least a little bit of Spanish. It isn't like it is a hard language for a native English speaker: simple and standardized conjugations; no need to alter adjectives or nouns beyond an -s for plural or an -a for feminine; a standardized highly phonetic script with a simple and widely used alphabet; pronunciations that are very similar to English. Compare the grammar with Russian, or the writing system with Chinese. Having this kind of a view is awfully ethnocentric of me (can ethnocentrism refer to a subculture, even if it is quite small?), but it is telling as to how the past two years have affected me. From reading Polyglot: How I Learn Languages (I don't even remember how I first found it, but the author was one of the first simultaneous interpreters, and learned more than a dozen languages), through discovering Benny The Irish Polyglot (who learns new languages up to conversational proficiency in just three months), and up until just a few days ago when I discovered LaoShu on YouTube (who spends five hours a day learning languages, and currently speaks either 50 or 15 of them, variable depending on the sound quality you can get from youtube. I'm not sure), the past few years of my life have been an explosion of linguistic possibility... and I am only just getting started.
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