This paper deals with the role of culture in the interplay of language and cognition. It attempts to unravel linguistic and cultural impact on gender associations for non-animate entities, by centering on members of one cultural group speaking two language variants that diverge as to whether or not they differentiate masculine and feminine gender. The gender system's (grammatical) impact on voice assignment is quite low, in comparison to the variation provoked by culturally transferred links within and over semantic fields. It is deabated how to control for culture as a tricky confound in cross-linguistic studies.