Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

of such nouns with conflicting genders to German and to Spanish speakers and asked the participants for their opinions on the properties of those nouns: whether they were weak or strong, little or big, and so on. On average, the nouns that are masculine in German but feminine in Spanish (chairs and keys, for example) got higher marks for strength from the Germans, whereas bridges and clocks, which are masculine in Spanish but feminine in German, were judged stronger on average by the Spanish speakers.

The simple conclusion from such an experiment would be that bridges do have more manly connotations for Spanish speakers than for German speakers. However, one possible objection to this inference is that it may not be the bridge itself that carries such connotations-it may only have been hearing the name together with the masculine article el or un. In this interpretation, when Spanish and German speakers simply look at a bridge, their associations may not be affected at all, and it may be only in the moment of speech, only through the act of saying or hearing the gender marker itself, that a fleeting association with manliness or womanliness is created in the speaker’s mind.

Is it possible, therefore, to get round the problem and check whether womanly or manly associations for inanimate nouns are present even when the gender markers in the relevant language are not explicitly mentioned? The psychologists Lera Boroditsky and Lauren Schmidt tried to do this by repeating a similar experiment with Spanish and German speakers, but this time communicating with the participants in English rather than in their respective mother tongue. Although the experiment was conducted in a language that treats inanimate objects uniformly as “it,” the Spanish and German speakers still showed marked differences in the attributes they chose for the relevant objects. German speakers tended to describe bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender; Spanish speakers as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, towering.

A more radical way of bypassing the problem was designed by the psychologist Maria Sera and her colleagues, who compared the reactions of French and Spanish speakers but used pictures of objects instead of words. As two closely related languages, French and Spanish mostly agree on gender, but there are still sufficiently many nouns that diverge: the fork, for instance, is la fourchette in French but el tenedor in Spanish, and so are cars (la voiture, el carro) and bananas (la banana, el platano); on the other hand, French beds are masculine (le lit) but Spanish ones are feminine (la cama), and the same goes for clouds (le nuage, la nube) and butterflies (le papillon, la mariposa). The participants in this experiment were asked to help in the preparation of a movie in which some everyday objects come to life. Their task was to choose the appropriate voice for each object in the movie. They were shown a series of pictures, and for each one they were asked to choose between a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. Although the names of the objects were never mentioned, when French speakers saw the picture of a fork, most of them wanted her to speak in a woman’s voice, whereas the Spanish speakers tended to choose a male voice for him instead. With the picture of the bed, the situation was reversed.

The experiments described above are certainly suggestive. They seem to show that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object affects the properties that speakers associate with this object. Or at least what the experiments demonstrate is that the grammatical gender affects the responses when speakers are actively requested to indulge their imaginations and come up with associations for such an object. But this last point is in fact a serious weakness. All the experiments described so far suffer from one underlying problem, namely that they forced the participants to exercise their imaginations. A skeptic could argue with some justification that the only thing the experiments proved was that grammatical genders affect associations when the participants are coerced unnaturally to dream up properties for various inanimate objects. In the worst case, one could parody what might be going on in a participant’s mind as something like: “Here I am being asked all sorts of ridiculous questions. Now they want me to think up properties for a bridge-goodness me, what’s next? Well, I’d better come up with something, otherwise they’ll never let me go home. So I’ll say X.” Under such circumstances, the first property that comes to a Spanish speaker’s mind is indeed likely to be more manlike than womanlike. In other words, if you force Spanish speakers to be on-the-spot poets, and extract properties of bridges out of them, the gender system will indeed affect their choice of properties. But how can we tell whether the masculine gender has any influence on speakers’ spontaneous conceptions of bridges, even outside such exercises in poetry on demand?

In the 1960s, the linguist Susan Ervin tried to downplay the element of creativity with an experiment that involved Italian speakers. She relied on the fact that Italian has very diffuse dialects, so even a native speaker would not be at all surprised to encounter entirely unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar dialect. Ervin invented a list of nonsense words that sounded as if they could be the dialectal terms for various objects. Some of these ended in -o (masculine) and the others in -a (feminine). She wanted to check what associations these words would evoke in Italian speakers but did not want the participants to realize that they were indulging in creative imagination. So she told them they were going to see a list of words from an Italian dialect that they didn’t know, and she pretended that the aim of the experiment was to check whether people could guess correctly the properties of words merely by the way they sound. The participants tended to attribute to the -o words similar properties to those they attributed to men (strong, big, ugly), whereas the -a words tended to be described with properties that were also used for women (weak, little, pretty). Ervin’s experiment showed that associations were affected by the grammatical gender even when the participants did not realize they were indulging in creative imagination and assumed that the question before them had a correct solution. But while this experiment went some way toward overcoming the problem of subjective judgments, it still did not solve the problem completely, since even if the participants were not aware of being coerced to produce associations on demand, in practice this is exactly what they were required to do.

In fact, it is difficult to imagine how one could design any experiment that would completely bypass the influence of subjective judgments. For the task requires nothing less than having one’s cake and eating it too: how can any experiment measure whether grammatical genders exert an influence on speakers’ associations, without soliciting these speakers for their associations? A few years ago, Lera Boroditsky and Lauren Schmidt found a way to do exactly that. They asked a group of Spanish speakers and a group of German speakers to participate in a memory game (which was conducted wholly in English, in order to avoid any explicit mention of the genders). The participants were given a list of two dozen inanimate objects, and for each of these objects, they had to memorize a person’s name. For example, “apple” had the name Patrick associated with it, and “bridge” had the name Claudia. The participants were given a fixed period of time to memorize the names associated with the objects, then tested on how well they had managed. A statistical analysis of the results showed that they were better at remembering the assigned names when the gender of the object matched the sex of the person, and that they found it more difficult to remember the names when the gender of the object clashed with the sex of the person. For example, Spanish speakers found it easier to remember the name associated with “apple” (la manzana) if it was Patricia rather than Patrick, and they found it easier to remember the name for a bridge (el puento) if it was Claudio rather than Claudia.

Since Spanish speakers found it objectively more difficult to match a bridge with a woman than with a man, we can conclude that when inanimate objects have a masculine or feminine gender, the associations of manhood or womanhood for these objects are present in Spanish speakers’ minds even when they are not actively solicited, even when the participants are not invited to opine on such questions as whether bridges are strong rather than slender, and even when they speak English.

Of course, one could still object that the memory task in question was fairly artificial and at some remove from the concerns of everyday life, where one is not often called upon to memorize whether apples or bridges are called Patrick or Claudia. But psychological experiments often have to rely on such narrowly circumscribed tasks in order to tease out statistically significant differences. The importance of the results is not in what they say about the particular task itself but in what they reveal about the effect of gender more generally, namely that manly or womanly associations of inanimate objects are strong enough in the minds of Spanish and German speakers to affect their ability to commit information to memory.

There is always room for refinement and improvement in psychological experiments, of course, and those