title: When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification.
abstract: The focus of this work was on the relation between grammatical gender and categorization. In one set of studies, monolingual English-, Spanish-, French-, and German-speaking children and adults assigned male and female voices to inanimate objects. Results from Spanish and French speakers indicated effects of grammatical gender on classification; results from German speakers did not. A connectionist model simulated the contradicting findings. The connectionist networks were also used to investigate which aspect of grammatical gender was responsible for the different pattern of findings. The predictions from the connectionist simulations were supported by the results from an artificial language-learning task. The results from this work demonstrate how connectionist networks can be used to identify the differences between languages that affect categorization.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 55455, USA. sera@umn.edu
authors.forename: Maria D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Sera
authors.forename: Chryle
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Elieff
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Forbes
authors.forename: Melissa Clark
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Burch
authors.forename: Wanda
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Rodríguez
authors.forename: Diane Poulin
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Dubois
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008960:Models, Psychological