Sedlmeier Peter, Tipandjan Arun, Jänchen Anastasia
Department of Psychology, Chemnitz University of Technology, 09107 , Chemnitz, Germany.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2016 Apr;45(2):317-36. doi: 10.1007/s10936-015-9350-x.
Does the language we speak shape the way we think? The present research concentrated on the impact of grammatical gender on cognition and examined the persistence of the grammatical gender effect by (a) concentrating on German, a three-gendered language, for which previous results have been inconsistent, (b) statistically controlling for common alternative explanations, (c) employing three tasks that differed in how closely they are associated with grammatical gender, and (d) using Tamil, a nongendered language, as a baseline for comparison. We found a substantial grammatical gender effect for two commonly used tasks, even when alternative explanations were statistically controlled for. However, there was basically no effect for a task that was only very loosely connected to grammatical gender (similarity rating of word pairs). In contrast to previous studies that found effects of the German and Spanish grammatical gender in English (a nongendered language), our study did not produce such effects for Tamil, again after controlling for alternative explanations, which can be taken as additional evidence for the existence of a purely linguistic grammatical gender effect. These results indicate that general grammatical gender effects exist but that the size of these effects may be limited and their range restricted.
我们所说的语言会塑造我们的思维方式吗？目前的研究聚焦于语法性对认知的影响，并通过以下方式检验语法性效应的持续性：(a) 以德语这种具有三种性别的语言为研究对象，此前关于德语的研究结果并不一致；(b) 对常见的其他解释进行统计控制；(c) 采用三项与语法性关联程度不同的任务；(d) 以泰米尔语这种没有性的语言作为比较基线。我们发现，即使对其他解释进行了统计控制，在两项常用任务中仍存在显著的语法性效应。然而，对于一项与语法性关联非常松散的任务（单词对的相似性评级），基本上没有影响。与之前发现德语和西班牙语的语法性在英语（一种没有性的语言）中产生效应的研究不同，在控制了其他解释之后，我们的研究并未在泰米尔语中发现此类效应，这可作为存在纯粹语言语法性效应的额外证据。这些结果表明，普遍的语法性效应是存在的，但这些效应的大小可能有限，范围也受到限制。
