ABSTRACT
In a recent paper, Lera Boroditsky and Lauren A. Schmidt (2000) examined the degree to which the linguistic category of grammatical gender of nouns influences people’s perception of the cognitive category of biological gender, or sex. Their conclusion was that English speakers’ intuitions about the gender of certain nouns (animals) correlate with the gender assigned to those nouns in languages such as German and Spanish. More important, they found that people’s ideas about the putative biological gender (sex) of objects are strongly influenced by the grammatical gender of those objects in their native language. In this study I sought to reproduce Boroditsky and Schmidt’s results in order to show that the interpretation they supplied is unwarranted, and that the authors conflate the concepts of biological gender (sex) and “formal gender”, which is employed by most Indo-European languages (as opposed to “natural gender”, in English). I compare the intuitions of 20 American monolinguals with the statistics of formal gender as it appears in 14 Indo-European languages. Moreover, I discuss the possible origin and evolution of gender in such languages, and suggest an explanation for the relation between grammatical and biological gender.
