Can Quirks of Grammar Affect the Way You Think? Grammatical Gender and Object Concepts

Can the language you speak affect the way you think? Unlike English, many languages have a grammatical gender system whereby all nouns are assigned a gender. Does talking about inanimate objects as if they were masculine or feminine actually lead people to think of inanimate objects as having a gender? A series of studies found effects of grammatical gender on people’s perceptions of similarity between objects and people. This was true even though the tasks were performed in English (a language devoid of grammatical gender), even when the tasks were non-linguistic (e.g., rating similarities between unlabeled pictures), and even while subjects were engaged in a verbal interference task. Finally, results showed that cross-linguistic differences in thought can be produced just by grammatical differences and in the absence of other cultural factors.