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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:78987 |
| Date | 28 April 2022 |
| Creators | Adam, Sophia |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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