Grammatical Gender Affects Bilinguals’ Conceptual Gender: Implicationsfor Linguistic Relativity and Decision Making

We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender af- fects bilinguals' conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French- English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respec- tively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English- Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the or- der of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making.

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