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There has been relatively little research on the effects of grammatical gender on thought when compared to other cognitive domains such as colour, time and space. The

available literature, however, suffices to show how an arbitrary property of some languages - such as grammatical gender - affects the conceptual representation of speakers. Some researchers maintain that children’s categorisation of entities in the real world might be affected by the categorisations reflected in their languages. For example, Bowerman (1985: 1285) commented that “children are prepared from the beginning to accept linguistic guidance as to which distinctions – from among the set of distinctions that are salient to them – they should rely on in organizing particular domains of meaning”. There seem to be different ways for the effects of grammatical gender to influence thought. Some researchers (e.g. Boroditsky and colleagues, 2003) argue that speakers of gendered languages begin to assign male and female properties to objects that do not have a sex as a result of acquiring the gender systems of their languages

which differentiate object nouns into feminine and masculine. The gender system then leads people to focus on some property of the noun’s referent. For example, if the word for sun is feminine in your language, you might focus on its warming and nourishing qualities. If, on the other hand, the word for sun is masculine, you may try to conceive it in terms of what are perceived as stereotypically masculine properties like power and threat. Sera et al. (1994), however, stated that speakers might store the grammatical gender of nouns as an extra feature of their conceptual representation of the object, especially in languages with two gender classes. Both views suggest the profound effect of grammatical gender on thought as it can change other universal conceptual

representations of objects. Both the studies by Boroditsky et al. (2003) and Sera et al. (1994) suggest that grammatical gender plays a role in affecting the mental

representation of objects. They further asserted that when two concepts or objects share labels of the same gender, this increases their semantic similarity.

Clarke et al. (1981) and Konishi (1993) show that speakers of languages with masculine and feminine genders were affected by this grammatical category when asked to rate the similarity between pairs of words in relation to masculine or feminine

properties. According to others, however, (e.g. Gennari et al., 2002) these effects can only influence speaker performance in tasks where the use of this knowledge may be strategic or mandatory in order to accomplish the task. We cannot ignore the possibility that when speakers of grammatically gendered languages are asked to assess artificial concepts/objects in terms of their gender classifications, they might feel prompted to rely on the linguistic markings of these items, particularly when there is no better way of completing the task. Clarke et al. (1981) argued, however, that participants in their task did not use grammatical gender as a strategy because they did not rate all

grammatically masculine words as either a hundred per cent masculine or

grammatically feminine words as one hundred per cent feminine. They considered this evidence of the effects of grammatical gender on speakers’ judgements.

Konishi (1993) tried to avoid an explicit reference to gender when employing a list of high-frequency words which were grammatically feminine in Spanish and grammatically masculine in German, or vice versa. In that study Spanish and German participants were asked to rate words in their language for potency - a characteristic determined to correlate with masculinity. The results showed an effect of gender on the participants’ ratings, which were consistent with the grammatical categorisations of their respective languages. Konishi (1993) considered these findings an indication of grammatical gender effects on speakers’ perceptions. If Konishi’s (1993) interpretation

is true, then all objects that share the same grammatical categories (e.g. masculine) should be perceived as more similar when compared to objects of another category (e.g. feminine), as they would share those feminine or masculine features. Therefore,

similarity effects should also be seen on similarity ratings between concepts of the same semantic groups whose label carries the same gender. One serious weakness of these studies is that the authors used words as stimuli and asked participants to explicitly rate words on masculinity/femininity scales. In gendered languages, there are often some formal qualities of nouns that show the type of gender. Using purely linguistic stimuli to study the effects of language on cognition might be argued to only measure participant knowledge of grammatical gender of their languages, rather than its effects on their cognition. The findings of these studies would have been more convincing if the authors had used a variety of cognitive - as well as non-cognitive tasks - to study the same issue.

Another view, however, suggests that the effects of grammatical gender on thought are caused by strategic access to this grammatical property in the language of the speaker to provide them with an additional feature to accomplish cognitive tasks (Vigliocco et al., 2002; Bowers et al., 1999). Based on this view, semantic and conceptual representations would not differ between languages and might be mostly independent of linguistic representations. Nevertheless, some languages were found to have a powerful role in influencing thought in tasks where no language was included or required, such as picture categorisation tasks.

A final view considers any effects of grammatical gender as a result of the implicit use of language to perform cognitive tasks. This should not be taken as evidence of language effects on thought as it barely shows any effect on linguistic encoding (Munnich and Landau, 2003). According to this view, tasks that involve obligatory language processing such as naming tasks should reveal language effects on thought. In order to better understand this effect, a variety of tasks that do not include linguistic processing should be carried out, such as picture categorisation and picture similarity rating tasks. Finding evidence of the effects of grammatical gender on cognition can offer us a better understanding of the role that our languages play on our thinking.