Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland.
Cogn Sci. 2012 Sep-Oct;36(7):1251-67. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2012.01251.x. Epub 2012 May 11.
In German, nouns are assigned to one of the three gender classes. For most animal names, however, the assignment is independent of the referent's biological sex. We examined whether German-speaking children understand this independence of grammar from semantics or whether they assume that grammatical gender is mapped onto biological sex when drawing inferences about sex-specific biological properties of animals. Two cross-linguistic studies comparing German-speaking and Japanese-speaking preschoolers were conducted. The results suggest that German-speaking children utilize grammatical gender as a cue for inferences about sex-specific properties of animals. Further, we found that Japanese- and German-speaking children recruit different resources when drawing inferences about sex-specific properties: Whereas Japanese children paralleled their pattern of inference about properties common to all animals, German children relied on the grammatical gender class of the animal. Implications of these findings for studying the relation between language and thought are discussed.
在德语中，名词被归入三个性别的其中之一。然而，对于大多数动物的名称来说，这种分类与所指动物的生物性别无关。我们考察了德语国家的儿童是否理解语法与语义之间的这种独立性，或者当他们根据动物的生物性别推断特定的生物属性时，是否会假定语法性别与生物性别相对应。我们进行了两项跨语言研究，比较了德语国家和日语国家的学龄前儿童。结果表明，德语国家的儿童将语法性别用作推断动物特定生物属性的线索。此外，我们发现，日语国家和德语国家的儿童在推断特定生物属性时使用了不同的资源：日语国家的儿童在推断所有动物共有的属性时采用了类似的推理模式，而德语国家的儿童则依赖于动物的语法性别类别。这些发现对研究语言与思维之间的关系具有重要意义。
