Grammatical gender and anthropomorphism: "It" depends on the language. 2022

Alican Mecit, and Tina M Lowrey, and L J Shrum
MINT Research Center, SKEMA Business School, Universite Cote d'Azur.

When English speakers anthropomorphize animals or objects, they refer to such entities using human pronouns (e.g., he or she instead of it). Unlike English, which marks gender only for humans, gendered languages such as French grammatically mark gender not only for humans but also for nonhumans. Research has shown that in gendered languages, although gender marking of nonhuman nouns is semantically arbitrary, people ascribe male and female properties to nonhuman entities consistent with their grammatical gender. Because grammatical gender conveys human-related properties, we question whether grammatically gender-marking nonhumans may elicit anthropomorphism tendencies. Across six studies, we show that gender marking of nonhuman nouns in gendered languages influences the way individuals mentally represent these entities and increases their anthropomorphism tendencies. We demonstrate the effects both by comparing anthropomorphism as a function of natural differences in languages with French-English bilinguals (Study 1) and by training native English speakers to use gender marking for nonhuman nouns as speakers of gendered languages do (Study 2). The following studies further demonstrate the effects within the French language by measuring (Study 3a) and manipulating (Studies 3b and 4) the salience of gender markings of nonhuman nouns. In Study 5 (preregistered), we replicate our basic finding and establish grammatical gender as an important linguistic element in shaping French speakers' anthropomorphism tendencies. We discuss the findings and the limitations in the culture-language-cognition triad and layout their implications for the debate on the extent to which language can mediate categorical and perceptual judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007802 Language A verbal or nonverbal means of communicating ideas or feelings. Dialect,Dialects,Languages
D008037 Linguistics The science of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Linguistic
D008297 Male Males
D005260 Female Females
D005783 Gender Identity A person's concept of self as being male and masculine or female and feminine, or ambivalent, based in part on physical characteristics, parental responses, and psychological and social pressures. It is the internal experience of gender role. Gender,Gender Identities,Identity, Gender
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000818 Animals Unicellular or multicellular, heterotrophic organisms, that have sensation and the power of voluntary movement. Under the older five kingdom paradigm, Animalia was one of the kingdoms. Under the modern three domain model, Animalia represents one of the many groups in the domain EUKARYOTA. Animal,Metazoa,Animalia

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