ACTIVIDAD 2: ETRUCTURA Y FUNCIÓN DE ÁCIDOS NUCLEICOS

The overall similarity between Arabic and English speakers’ ratings indicated that ratings by the two groups did not differ from each other, suggesting that they neither increased with pairs of same gender, nor decreased with pairs of different gender. These results are consistent with Degani (2007) and Ramos & Roberson (2010) who studied the effects of grammatical gender using similarity rating tasks - similar to the one used in the present study - and did not find any difference between speakers of Spanish and English (Degani, 2007), or speakers of English and Portuguese (Ramos & Roberson, 2010). Through the use of similarity rating tasks - with only pictorial stimuli - to investigate the possible effects of grammatical gender on speakers’ ratings, most research has not reported any effect.

Furthermore, these results are in line with early evidence on the limited effects of grammatical gender by Hafstatter (1963) who studied both German and Italian speakers. Hafstatter assumed different behaviours between the two groups based on the

grammatical differences in their gender systems. Southern Europeans, for example, would perceive the sun as "powerful, but also threatening", whereas northern Europeans would perceive the sun as a "comfortably warm, mother-like womanly sun". He tested

this idea using a semantic differential test with twenty four bipolar adjectives, and concluded that neither grammatical gender nor geographical differences (northern Germany vs. Palermo, Italy) had an effect on the participants’ ratings. Using similar scales, Mills (1986) tested English and German speakers on six nouns with animate referents and four with inanimate referents. The findings revealed that grammatical gender does not have an effect on ratings made by people. Likewise, the present findings speak against the idea that speakers of grammatically gendered languages perceive inanimate items that share the same grammatical gender as more similar and then attribute natural gender properties (masculine and feminine features) to these items during language development.

Gentner and Markman (1994) noted that the process of determining the similarity of a pair of items is central to various mental processes and that a pair's similarity increases with its commonalities (the elements of the matching representational

structure) and decreases with its differences. Asking participants to quantitatively judge the similarities between two items was, however, not an easy task as most participants were unsure about properties that can be appropriate to make accurate ratings.

Participants were, therefore, advised to use the whole range of values on the provided scales and to use whatever dimension to assess similarities between the pairs. The main findings showed that Arabic grammatical gender was not a useful property in assessing similarities between two items of the same grammatical gender, meaning that these types of pair were rated equally similar by both Arabic and English speakers. All participants mentioned that they performed the task without thinking of grammatical gender.

We should also consider two studies, by Clarke et al. (1981) and Boroditsky et al. (2003), which showed the effects of gender on participant ratings. The inconsistent conclusions reached by these two studies and other research - including the present study - might be due to the different types of stimuli used in the experiments. For

example, Clarke et al. (1981) only used words and explicitly asked participants to assess the words on masculine-feminine scales. In such cases, it seems natural for speakers of gendered languages to use gender information in order to construct grammatically correct sentences, thereby showing linguistic knowledge rather than cognitive influence of this grammatical feature. A possible interpretation of their findings might be found in the Similarity and Gender Hypothesis, mentioned earlier (in section 2.2.4), which assumes that words that share a gender will be perceived as more similar in meaning and thus would behave as semantically related by virtue of their shared linguistic

contexts. With regard to Boroditsky et al. (2003), they used pictures of people and animals which may allow the use of grammatical gender information to match the biological gender of the stimuli.

To sum up, this property does not seem to have a pervasive role in conceptual representation. The effects of grammatical gender on speakers’ categorisations has therefore, appeared only in tasks that cannot be completed without accessing this knowledge. For example in voice and name attribution tasks, participants are likely to use any available knowledge in order to better give accurate responses and grammatical gender could be one of them. The similarity rating task, however, prevented participants from drawing on grammatical gender information in a strategic manner, meaning that no effect was found. The discrepancy between these findings and those obtained from the voice-attribution task indicates that the effects of grammatical gender do not arise at a deep conceptual level; rather the effect is task-dependent. This explanation is

consistent with Bowers et al. (1999) and Gennari et al. (2002) who are proponents of the strategic use of grammatical gender in certain tasks, suggesting that grammatical gender does not affect people’s cognition at a deep conceptual level and that such effects are not apparent in all circumstances. Martinez & Shatz (1996) pointed out that only six (out of 18) Spanish speaking children sorted pictures of people and objects based on the grammatical gender of their language and that small number did not differ from being pure chance.

After verifying that both monolingual speakers of Arabic and English behaved in similar ways in the rating task, it was of interest to see what the bilinguals who speak these two languages would think about similarities between these pairs. Therefore, the aim of the next section (5.2) is to study how bilinguals would rate the pairs in question and whether or not they differ from their monolingual counterparts, taking into account a number of factors that might affect their cognition.

5.2 Experiment 2B: The Effects of Grammatical Gender on Similarity Ratings of