Re: Linguistic gender and perception

On Apr 6, 11:51 am, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:

I take it you didn't listen to the radio article. I don't know that it
fully addresses all your questions, which I had also raised in my head,
but the article described an experiment in which children who spoke only
English were exposed to instruction in a fake language called
"Gamboozie" (sp?) with gender, and evidently within a day effects of the
instruction on students' evaluations of various objects began to show.
Not enough details were given for me to form an opinion on how sloppy or
rigorous this experiment was, so I'm interested in getting more
information.

Also, while it would add interesting data, I don't think including a
language without grammatical gender like English is strictly necessary.
If German/Spanish pairs like

Brücke (f)/puente (m)
Tisch (m)/mesa (f)
Sonne (f)/sol (m)
Mond (m)/luna (f)

lead to consistent response patterns from test subjects, that would be
significant.

But do the English-speakers go in one direction or the other, or none
at all?

I would also wonder whether neuter nouns (in languages having them)
pattern with masculine or feminine nouns, or with neither.

If she mentioned that German has a neuter, Krulwitch didn't put it in
the report.
.

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