Linguistic relativity: object categorisation differences between Arabic and English speakers
We examined the potential effects of the Arabic grammatical gender system on object categorisation using an online voice attribution task. Compared to native English speakers (including English monolinguals and English-Arabic bilinguals), native Arabic speakers (including Arabic monolinguals and...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2020
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17145/1/543-2249-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/17145/ http://spaj.ukm.my/ppppm/jpm/issue/view/41 |
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| Summary: | We examined the potential effects of the Arabic grammatical gender system on object
categorisation using an online voice attribution task. Compared to native English
speakers (including English monolinguals and English-Arabic bilinguals), native Arabic
speakers (including Arabic monolinguals and Arabic-English bilinguals) were more
likely to assign either a man’s voice (or a boy’s voice) or a woman’s voice (or a girl’s voice) to
inanimate objects with a gender that was consistent with the objects’ grammatical gender
in Arabic. Interestingly, when assigning genders to objects that do not have an associative
stereotypical gender, a male-attribution tendency was found in both native Arabic
speakers and native English speakers. Additionally, while native Arabic speakers and
native English speakers assigned voices consistently with Arabic grammatical gender
(GG) to objects with an associative stereotypical gender compatible with its grammatical
gender in Arabic, they assigned voices to objects with an associative stereotypical gender
incompatible with its grammatical gender in Arabic, likely based on object-gender
stereotypical associations. Additionally, the performance of Arabic and English
monolinguals was highly comparable with that of Arabic-English and English-Arabic
bilinguals. We conclude that while the effects of linguistic structure on object
categorisation might be generalised to Oriental languages, these effects are constrained
and sometimes over-ridden by object-gender stereotypical associations, supporting a fully
interactive account of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. |
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