The influence of grammatical gender on object perception in German and Polish

What is it about?

In grammatical gender language, such as German or Polish, each noun has a grammatical gender (female/ male/ neuter). Scientists agree that the language we speak influences how we think. Therefore, it is worth asking whether grammatical gender has an impact on how we think. More specifically, we aimed to find out whether German and Polish speakers associate objects as female or male based on the grammatical gender, the object has in their native language. We have conducted an experiment to investigate whether Polish (N=21) and German (N=27) speakers follow the grammatical gender of an object when providing a first name for it (e.g., James or Maya). Results suggest that while Polish speakers provided names that were in accordance with the object’s grammatical gender, German speakers did not

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Why is it important?

Our findings interestingly show that grammatical gender can have an impact on object perception, however the effect seems to be dependent on the language itself, since Polish speakers followed the grammatical gender when naming objects, while German speakers did not. This also shows that more research to explain these differences is needed.