Grammatical Gender and Meaning

Two experiments assessed whether grammatical gender of Italian nouns referring to animals and tools affects conceptual representations of the corresponding objects, comparing results from Italian and English. In the first experiment, we elicited semantic substitution errors (e.g., saying “hammer” when “axe” is intended), finding language-specific gender effects (more errors in Italian than English for words sharing gender) for words referring to animals but not for words referring to tools. In the second experiment, words sharing gender were judged as more similar in meaning by Italian speakers than English speakers, again only for animals and not for tools. Moreover, no such gender effect was observed for pictures of the same animals.