The influence of the grammatical gender on the conceptualisation of objects (an experimental study)

The article investigates the influence of the grammatical gender on the conceptualisation of objects by native speakers and bilinguals. The research is carried out in the theoretical framework of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. This hypothesis is presently in the focus of vigorous scientific discussions by the representatives of different scientific fields, and it attracts a lot of research implementing both linguistic and psycholinguistic methods. The subject of the experimental psycholinguistic research is the grammatical category of gender in Russian and Spanish languages. Nowadays many papers implement psycholinguistic methods in the investigation of the grammatical gender. However, almost no research is done on the material of the Russian language. The authors conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that the differences in the grammatical categorisation of nouns in Russian and Spanish languages would influence the perception of objects by the native speakers of these languages and bilinguals. The method the authors used partially derived from the paper by L. Boroditsky and W. Philips (Phillips W., Boroditsky L. "Can Quirks of Grammar Affect the Way You Think?"). The respondents saw paired pictures of men and women and objects on the screen, and their task was to rate the similarity of these pictures on the scale from 1 to 7. The participants were Russian native speakers who did not speak foreign languages except for English that lacks grammatical gender and late functional Russian-Spanish bilinguals. The results of the experiments demonstrated the influence of the grammatical gender in the Russian language on the perception of objects by native speakers who indeed perceived objects denoted by the nouns of masculine gender as more similar to men than to women. In the first experiment the authors used nouns of the opposite grammatical gender in Russian and Spanish, and bilinguals' responses did not show any difference in ratings of congruent (like a woman - a book that are both feminine in Russian) and non-congruent (like a man - a book, where man is masculine and book is feminine in Russian) pairs. In the second experiment the authors used nouns of the corresponding grammatical gender in Russian and Spanish, and bilinguals rated congruent pairs as much more similar than non-congruent. These results prove that bilinguals' perception is influenced by both their first and second languages. The experiments that the authors conducted confirmed the hypothesis that the differences in the grammatical categorisation of nouns in Russian and Spanish languages influence the perception of objects by the native speakers of these languages and bilinguals. The present study contributes to the linguistic relativity hypothesis and enriches its material and methodology.

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