Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University at Shonan-Fujisawa.
Cogn Sci. 2014 Apr;38(3):514-36. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12074. Epub 2013 Aug 19.
Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., any giraffe, be it male or female, is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender. This research investigated whether this motivation affects deductive inference in native German speakers. We compared German with Japanese speakers (a language without grammatical gender) when making inferences about sex-specific biological properties. We found that German speakers tended to erroneously draw inferences when the sex in the premise and grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. An over-generalization of the grammar-semantics mapping was found even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated. However, these effects occurred only when gender-marking articles accompanied the nouns. These results suggest that German speakers project sex-specific biological properties onto gender-marking articles but not onto conceptual representations of animals per se.
语法性别与大多数动物名称的生物性别无关（例如，任何一只长颈鹿，无论雄性还是雌性，在语法上都被视为阴性）。然而，语法性别类别显然有语义动机，尤其是在将人类术语映射到性别上。本研究调查了这种动机是否会影响以德语为母语的人的演绎推理。我们比较了德语和日语使用者（一种没有语法性别语言）在对特定于性别的生物属性进行推理时的情况。我们发现，当前提中的性别与目标动物的语法性别相同时，德语使用者往往会错误地进行推理。即使目标的性别被明确指出，也会出现语法语义映射的过度泛化。然而，这些影响仅在性别标记冠词伴随名词时才会发生。这些结果表明，德语使用者将特定于性别的生物属性投射到性别标记冠词上，而不是投射到动物的概念表示上。
