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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 143–157

A table named James or a table named Maya?

The influence of grammatical gender on the perception of objects in German and Polish

| Leiden University
| Leiden University
| Leiden University
| Leiden University

In French, the noun apple (la pomme) is grammatically feminine, in German (der Apfel) it is masculine. Does this entail that French speakers perceive apples to be feminine whereas German speakers attribute masculine characteristics to them? Various studies suggest that grammatical gender does indeed influence object perception (Haertlé 2017; Boroditsky & Schmidt 2000), although findings are not always replicated (Bender et al. 2011). The current study investigates this phenomenon for Polish, an understudied language in this domain, and German, a language for which contradictory results have been obtained. We investigated whether Polish (N = 21) and German (N = 27) speakers follow the grammatical gender of an object when providing a first name for it (e.g. James or Maya). Results suggest that while Polish speakers provided names that were in accordance with the object’s grammatical gender, German speakers did not. Cross-linguistic differences between these two languages (regarding noun transparency) may explain these findings.

Keywords: language-cognition interface, cross-linguistic differences, grammatical gender, object perception
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Cross-linguistic differences in grammatical gender
    • 1.2Current knowledge regarding the impact of grammatical gender on cognition
    • 1.3The current study
    • 1.4Predictions
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Design and materials
    • 2.3Experimental procedure
    • 2.4Scoring procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Descriptive statistics
    • 3.2Inferential statistics
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Interpretation
    • 4.2Limitations and suggestions for future research
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 4 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00066.kur
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