"language Preference and Cognitive Availability of Sexual Identity in Gay Japanese Bilinguals: an Analysis of Habitual Use of Linguistic Categories"

Sexuality is a very private matter in Japan. Japan’s cultural mores and concepts of family unity have led to very conservative attitudes toward homosexuality. For instance, gay people generally fear disgracing their families, and this fear might prevent them from revealing their sexual identity to others, and so keeping it secret. Thus, homosexuality in Japan is a highly controversial topic. Being gay in Japan is not as tolerated as it is in some Western cultures (McLelland, 2000). Homosexuality is an issue that is not acknowledged by mainstream Japanese society – it is taboo and not spoken about publicly. The present study explored gay bilingual Japanese individuals' abilities to produce words about sexuality to determine whether talking and thinking about sexuality differs between the two languages in Japanese-English bilingual individuals in terms of: (a) number of words produced, (b) time to produce words, (c) average word production rate (word/time), and (d) word length (simple words versus long words). Typically, it is easier for bilinguals to produce words in their native language: “fluency” entails a better language flow, as it were. Sixteen gay native-Japanese bilinguals (whose English levels were advanced [n=11] and intermediate [n=5]) were instructed to say as many words as they could in both English and Japanese with regards to eight prompts (four “sexuality” and four “neutral”). The sexuality prompts generated words associated with the subjects’ sexual identity, nouns for describing themselves, and adjectives describing their experiences, whereas neutral prompts generated mostly nouns describing objects, places, and names. Differences between neutral words and words regarding sexual identity were examined as a way to control for psycholinguistic differences. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the weak form of the linguistic relativity theory: thinking Running head: LANGUAGE PREFERENCE AND COGNITIVE AVAILABILITY