Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Reader 1

Lise Abrams

Reader 2

Laura Johnson

Reader 3

Michelle Decker

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Several Indo-European languages have grammatical gender constructs in which nouns are assigned to a gendered noun class, typically masculine or feminine. Speakers of such languages must categorize inanimate nouns as masculine or feminine, despite these objects lacking biological sex. Some research has been conducted on whether grammatical gender affects the gender conceptualizations of inanimate objects: for example, do individuals perceive grammatically feminine objects as having more feminine qualities? The question of the effects of grammatical gender on cognition is rooted in the theory of linguistic relativity, first coined by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf in the 1950s (Sera et al., 1994). This theory claims that cross-linguistic differences affect how speakers of different languages perceive reality. Research on linguistic relativity has explored several language constructs, including how different languages encode concepts of time, spatial orientation, color discrimination, number representations, and object categorization (Samuel et al., 2019). However, studies examining the effects of grammatical gender have yielded conflicting results, and often only focus on native speakers. This study examined the potential effects of priming with grammatical gender on conceptual gender associations in intermediate L2 French speakers. Participants were primed with images of inanimate nouns that were either grammatically masculine or feminine in French, then completed a lexical decision task in which target words represented culturally masculine or feminine activities. Results indicated little to no impact of grammatical gender on gender conceptualization. The findings of this study imply that grammatical gender may not affect gender concepts in non-fluent speakers of a gendered language, but the conflicting nature of the literature in this field calls for further research.

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