This thesis investigates the correlation between the grammatical gender of generic nouns denoting animals and the perceived biological sex of their referents. Based upon an approach by Imai et al. (2014), a reaction task experiment was conducted in which participants had to make inferences about the biological sex of specific animals. Four languages with differing grammatical gender systems were tested: Spanish, French, German and English. The experiment was conducted with native speakers in their respective languages. The results showed that Spanish, French and German speakers were influenced by grammatical gender when completing the task, while results in the English test group remained unaffected by this factor. In the Spanish and French sample there were several test conditions where gender effects were significant, whereas for the German sample significant effects could only be found in one test condition. Furthermore, in the French and German test groups, significant gender effects were found only when the target words were accompanied by gender-marked definite articles. For Spanish, effects were significant even when the stimuli were presented in the plural form without articles. These results imply that structural features, such as gender marking articles and the transparency of the Spanish gender system, seem to facilitate the projection of sex-specific properties onto grammatical gender. This study can be taken as weak support for linguistic relativity.

The problem of content management of multimedia data types (e.g., image, video, graphics) is becoming increasingly important with the development of advanced multimedia applications. Traditional database management systems are inadequate for the handling of such data types. They require new techniques for query formulation, retrieval, evaluation, and navigation. In this paper we develop a knowledge-based framework for modeling and retrieving image data by content. To represent the various aspects of an image object's characteristics, we propose a model which consists of three layers: (1) Feature and Content Layer, intended to contain image visual features such as contours, shapes,etc.; (2) Object Layer, which provides the (conceptual) content dimension of images; and (3) Schema Layer, which contains the structured abstractions of images, i.e., a general schema about the classes of objects represented in the object layer. We propose two abstract languages on the basis of description logics: one for describing knowledge of the object and schema layers, and the other, more expressive, for making queries. Queries can refer to the form dimension (i.e., information of the Feature and Content Layer) or to the content dimension (i.e., information of the Object Layer). These languages employ a variable free notation, and they are well suited for the design, verification and complexity analysis of algorithms. As the amount of information contained in the previous layers may be huge and operations performed at the Feature and Content Layer are time-consuming, resorting to the use of materialized views to process and optimize queries may be extremely useful. For that, we propose a formal framework for testing containment of a query in a view expressed in our query language. The algorithm we propose is sound and complete and relatively efficient. / This is an extended version of the article in: Eleventh International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, Warsaw, Poland, 1999.