It's True: What You Say Influences What You Think!!

Does the gender of a noun influence the way speakers think about the object to which the noun applies? On NPR's Morning Edition, Robert Krulwich interviewed Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky about her experiment with speakers of languages that assign gender to nouns.

Boroditsky asked German and Spanish speakers to supply a list of words that came to mind when they thought about the word "bridge". The Spanish subjects produced a list containing words like "strong", "big" and "towering", while the German speakers came up with words like "beautiful", "slender" and "elegant".

It turns out that the German word for "bridge" is assigned the feminine gender, while the Spanish word is assigned the masculine gender. The adjectives selected seem to reflect common stereotypes of human gender.

Boroditsky repeated the test with the word "key", which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. In this case, the German list of descriptors included "jagged", "heavy" and "hard", while the Spanish list included "little", "lovely", and "intricate".

This seems to suggest pretty strongly that the rules of the two languages have conditioned different emotional reaction to otherwise inanimate, ungendered objects, based solely on what an English speaker would probably call an arbitrary quirk.

I wonder if we could extrapolate from this that the lack of gender in English in any way contributes to its use as the "universal" language for economics, science and, to some extent, art.