Only Mother Tongue Matters: The Effect of Grammatical Gender on the Conceptualization of Objects in Tatar-Russian Bilinguals

It has been shown previously that grammatical gender affects objects' conceptualization. Specifically, it was revealed that people tend to endow objects without biological sex by masculine/feminine properties if the linguistic label for the object has a masculine/feminine gender. Data suggest that the linguistic label being part of the concept is activated automatically and affects people's judgment about the object. Despite a bulk of research that deals with the question about grammatical gender and concepts, it is still not very clear how conceptualization is built in the bilingual mind, especially, when one of the languages acquired by people does not have the grammatical gender. In the current study, the authors investigate the issue of whether the grammatical gender of the second language would affect conceptualization in Tatar-Russian bilinguals. The thing is that in the group of Tatar-Russian bilinguals bilin-gualism is early-sequential. Additionally, Russian is dominant, unlike Tatar, which is the first language, however, for the usage, it is subordinate to Russian. The authors conducted two experiments. One of them was a control one. Russian native speakers were engaged to test whether the effect of gender works in the chosen paradigm with the current sample. The second experiment was carried out with the Tatar-Russian bilinguals. The procedure was as follows. Participants saw pairs of pictures, with a picture of a man or a woman and an object next to it. The linguistic marker for the object could have either a masculine or a feminine grammatical gender. Thus, congruent and incongruent pairs were presented, for instance, a man and a bicycle (velosiped, masculine) or a man and a fish (ryba, feminine), respectively. The task was to evaluate to what extent two pictures are similar, using the 7-point Likert scale. The authors hypothesized that people would tend to estimate congruent pairs as more similar than incongruent ones in the first experiment. They predicted that the attenuated effect of gender would appear in the group of the Tatar-Russian bilinguals when instructions are given in Russian. They also expected that, when instructions are given in Tatar, the effect would fade. Results revealed a strong effect of the grammatical gender in the group of Russian native speakers, whereas in the group of Tatar-Russian bilinguals only a marginal effect of gender was found, even when the authors tried to boost realization of the differences between languages, using the Tatar and Russian sentence context before the experiment. To sum up, the experiments showed that the grammatical system of the second language could have an effect on objects' conceptualization. In other words, its grammatical system is not acquired as a 'linguistic technique' but affects conceptualization deeply.

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