title: Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use.
abstract: In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University College London, London, England, UK. g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Gabriella
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vigliocco
authors.forename: David P
authors.initials: DP
authors.lastname: Vinson
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Paganelli
authors.forename: Katharina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dworzynski
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning