Lady Liberty and Godfather Death as candidates for linguistic relativity? Scrutinizing the gender congruency effect on personified allegories with explicit and implicit measures

Abstract

Linguistic relativity—the idea that language affects thought by way of its grammatical categorizations—has been controversially debated for decades. One of the contested cases is the grammatical gender of nouns, which is claimed to affect how their referents are conceptualized (i.e., as rather female or male in congruence with the grammatical gender of the noun), especially when used allegorically. But is this association strong enough to be detected in implicit measures, and, if so, can we disentangle effects of grammatical gender and allegorical association? Three experiments with native speakers of German tackled these questions. They revealed a gender congruency effect on allegorically used nouns, but this effect was stronger with an explicit measure (assignment of biological sex) than with an implicit measure (Extrinsic Affective Simon Task) and disappeared in the implicit measure when grammatical gender and allegorical associations were set into contrast. Taken together, these findings indicate that the observed congruency effect was driven by the association of nouns with personifications rather than by their grammatical gender. In conclusion, we also discuss implications of these findings for linguistic relativity.

Keywords:

• Cognition
• Language
• Linguistic relativity
• Grammatical gender
• Allegories
• Extrinsic Affective Simon Task

Notes

¹For reasons of conceptual clarity, in the remainder of this paper the term “gender” is used for the grammatical category, and the term “sex” for the biological gender of animates; likewise, usage of “feminine” and “masculine” is restricted to grammatical gender, and usage of “female” and “male” to sex.

²For most native speakers of German, the grammatical gender of nouns appears to be arbitrary. In order to assess a noun's gender they therefore typically combine it with a definite article and test their agreement (e.g., Brücke is feminine if die Brücke “sounds right”—an intuition that is largely derived from the lexical entry in the mental lexicon). This strategy is emphasized by the Duden, the standard volume on German language, which indicates gender simply by giving the appropriate definite article. To interfere with this strategy of gender checking, we presented randomly selected feminine or masculine articles together with the noun, producing correct or incorrect combinations in half of the trials each. To further hamper gender checking, the article was presented in postposition, which is generally at odds with German syntax. Participants were instructed to ignore these articles as irrelevant to the task at hand. When we introduced these two manipulations in previous studies, we basically observed a substantial overall increase in reaction time, together with a slight decrease in accuracy, but no changes in the overall pattern. Possible implications of this manipulation are picked up in the discussion.

³As indicated in Supplemental Material B, the final model in most of the reported analyses includes random slopes for response association as a function of participants. This indicates interindividual differences with regard to the preference for the “female” or “male” response key, perhaps due to an interaction between the participant's handedness and the balanced assignment of the response keys.

⁴The animates were not included in these analyses as no ratings were collected for these items (and there would be only little variance, as these items are, by definition, either clearly female or clearly male).