White Theresa L, Cunningham Caitlin M, Zampini Mary L
Department of Psychology, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214, USA.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY 13214, USA.
Brain Sci. 2022 Sep 28;12(10):1313. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12101313.
Linguistic relativism is the idea that the structure of language influences thought. The present study investigates linguistic relativism by asking whether people who speak a gendered language think of objects in a way that is consistent with the grammatical gender (more masculine or feminine) more than people who speak a language without that linguistic feature. Odorants are unique stimuli for examining this question, because they carry a semantic gender without a biological one, yet gender is thought to be a central dimension of their perception. Canadian participants in the present study (native French or native English speakers) described a set of labeled odorants that varied systematically in grammatical and semantic gender to produce an implicit gender measure and also explicitly rated them for gender. Analysis of the implicit femininity contained in participants' descriptions showed a tendency for both native French and native English speakers to produce descriptions that were consistent with semantic gender; moreover, there were no effects of grammatical gender on implicit or explicit ratings. These results suggest that in a bilingual culture, French speakers may have been influenced by the anthropomorphism associated with odorants rather than grammatical gender.
语言相对论是指语言结构会影响思维的观点。本研究通过询问说有性别区分语言的人对物体的认知方式是否比说没有这种语言特征的人更符合语法性别（更具男性化或女性化）来探究语言相对论。气味剂是检验这个问题的独特刺激物，因为它们带有语义上的性别属性但没有生物学上的性别属性，然而性别被认为是对其感知的一个核心维度。本研究中的加拿大参与者（以法语为母语或英语为母语）描述了一组带有标签的气味剂，这些气味剂在语法和语义性别上有系统地变化，以产生一个隐性性别度量，并且还对它们的性别进行了明确评分。对参与者描述中所包含的隐性女性特质的分析表明，以法语为母语和以英语为母语的人都有产生与语义性别一致描述的倾向；此外，语法性别对隐性或显性评分没有影响。这些结果表明，在双语文化中，说法语的人可能受到了与气味剂相关的拟人化影响，而非语法性别。
