Grammatical gender influences the perception of bilinguists.

SE 367 Project

By Debosmita Chaudhuri.

Proposal

Project Report

Presentation

Abstract

How language shapes thought is an important question in context of cognitive science because it might enable us to explain the various factors that affects perception. The idea that language might influence thought was first proposed by Wharf in 1956 which later on came to be popularly known as Whorfian hypothesis. Language however can influence thought in a number of ways, e.g. through the way it describes time, through the way it describes the visual space or through the way it describes even inanimate objects having genders. This project duplicates with certain modifications the experiments conducted by Boroditsky, Schmidt and Philips and summarized in their work Sex, Syntax and Semantics, to study the effect of the grammatical genders assigned to inanimate objects in certain languages in the cognitive processes involving thinking about these objects. The experiments were conducted to test the effect of grammatical gender on memory, on the description of objects and the separation of effect of gramma form effect of culture. The results obtained were by and large supportive of Boroditsky, Schmidt and Philip's claim of grammatical gender having a pronounced effect on the way we perceive and think about objects even while performing linguistic tasks in a non-gendered language that we are equally fluent in. Experiments were conducted on three groups of bilinguals (English and Hindi speaking, English and French speaking and English and Telegu speaking) to determine the effects.

Some of the results obtained are as follows:

Does grammatical gender affect memory: ( It is easier to remember names that conform to grammatical gender of the object

English and Hindi speakers (8 subjects, 12 objects)

English and French speakers (4 subjects, 10 objects)

Does grammatical gender affect perception of inanimate objects

Assessing the above according to the grammar rules of an imaginary language to rule out culture effects: