What constrains grammatical gender effects on semantic judgements? Evidence from Portuguese

Abstract

Four studies investigated whether grammatical gender biases the semantic judgements of Portuguese speakers, relative to speakers of English. Some research reports that grammatical gender has a pervasive influence on speakers' cognitive representations (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Philips, 2003; Sera, Elieff, Forbes, Burch, & Rodriguez, 2002). Others argue that effects of grammar arise through linguistic processing (e.g., Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, & Dworzynski, 2005) and are restricted to animate categories for which gender is a pertinent feature. The present results found effects of gender in Portuguese speakers' judgements of inanimate objects, but only when gender was task relevant and/or when the stimuli were words, rather than pictures. These findings support the view that gender effects on cognitive judgements arise as a function of linguistic processing and/or task demands, rather than directly influencing conceptual or semantic representations.

Keywords:

• Grammatical gender
• Portuguese
• Semantic judgements

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a University of Essex Studentship Grant to the first author. We are grateful to Prof. Ventura, Prof. Verhaeghe, Prof. Pavão Martins, and Dr. Fernandes of the University of Lisbon, Dr. Leite and Dr. Fernandes of the University of Évora, and Prof. Barbeiro of the Escola Superior de Educação de Leiria for their help in data collection. We also thank Dr. Susan Rickard Liow, Dr. Melvin Yap, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript.