Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)

ElsevierVolume 127, December 2022, 104357Journal of Memory and LanguageHighlights•

Phillips & Boroditsky (2003) found effects of grammatical gender on object concepts.

We replicated P&B’s experiments assessing same-/different-gender picture similarity.

Spanish and German speakers’ similarity ratings showed no gender congruency effect.

Category-trained English speakers’ similarity ratings mirrored P&B’s results.

This mixed pattern informs when and how grammatical gender affects object concepts.

Abstract

Many languages assign nouns to grammatical gender categories (e.g., masculine and feminine), and inanimate objects often have different genders in different languages. In a seminal study, Phillips and Boroditsky (2003) provided evidence that such “quirks of grammar” influence how people conceptualize objects. Spanish and German speakers judged person-object picture pairs as more similar when their biological and grammatical genders matched than when they did not, and English speakers showed the same pattern of similarity judgments after learning gender-like categories. These widely cited findings were instrumental in vindicating the Whorfian hypothesis that language shapes thought, yet neither the original study nor any direct replications have appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. To examine the reliability of Phillips and Boroditsky’s findings, we conducted a high-powered replication of two of their key experiments (total N = 375). Our results only partially replicated the original findings: Spanish and German speakers’ similarity judgments exhibited no effect of grammatical gender when accounting for key sources of error variance, but English speakers trained on gender-like categories rated same-gender pairs more similar than different-gender pairs. These results provide insight into the contexts in which grammatical gender effects occur and the mechanisms driving them.

Keywords

Grammatical gender

Linguistic relativity

Object concepts

Replication

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