Editing Grammatical gender (section)

=== How gender contrasts can influence cognition ===
{{See also|Linguistic relativity}}
It has been shown that grammatical gender causes a number of cognitive effects.<ref name="McWhorter2014">{{cite book |first=John H. |last=McWhorter |title=The Language Hoax |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=dpnlAgAAQBAJ&q=ideas%20about%20gender |date=1 April 2014 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0-19-936160-1}}</ref> For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others.<ref name="Pavlidou">{{cite journal |last1=Pavlidou |first1=Theodossia-Soula |last2=Alvanoudi |first2=Angeliki |title=Grammatical Gender and Cognition |work=[[James Cook University]] |date=2013 |url= https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/31865/1/31865_Alvanoudi_Pavlidou_2013.pdf |access-date=20 December 2018}}</ref><ref name="ChiuHong2013">{{cite book |first1=Chi-Yue |last1=Chiu |first2=Ying-yi |last2=Hong |title=Social Psychology of Culture |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=8xVdAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA120 |date=16 December 2013 |publisher=[[Psychology Press]] |isbn=978-1-317-71018-9 |page=120}}</ref>

Caveats of this research include the possibility of subjects "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task",<ref>Boroditsky et al. (2003), cited in Pavlidou & Alvanoudi (2013).</ref> and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light", but male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy".<ref name="ChiuHong2013" /> Apparent failures to reproduce the effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender.<ref>Sera et al. (2002) and Vigliocco et al. (2005), cited in Pavlidou & Alvanoudi (2013).</ref><ref name="ChiuHong2013" />

Another kind of test, the [[semantic differential]], asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing a bridge ({{langx|de|Brücke}}, {{abbr|f.|feminine}}) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for 'bridge' is masculine ({{lang|es|puente}}, {{abbr|m.|masculine}}), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often.<ref name="Edge">{{cite web |last=Boroditsky |first=Lera |author-link=Lera Boroditsky |title=How does our language shape the way we think? |url= https://www.edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think |access-date=20 December 2018 |work=[[Edge.org#Edge.org|Edge.org]] |date=11 June 2009}}</ref> However, studies of this kind have been criticized on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall.<ref name="Pavlidou" />