语法性别对认知的影响及其机制

Grammatical Gender Effects and Mechanisms on Cognition

语法性别是许多语言中普遍存在的现象。它本质上属于句法属性,但是一定程度上关联着语义,而且会影响个体对物体的分类、知觉、认知加工,以及对二语的学习等认知活动,其对认知的影响程度受任务、语言、语法性别透明度等因素调节。语法性别影响认知的机制主要有概念水平上的相似性假设、生物性假设、词汇水平上的双选择模型。未来的研究要进一步探究语法性别的认知机制、二语学习中语法性别习得的认知过程、语法性别不同形式性别差异影响的机制。

Grammatical genders are a common phenomenon in many languages. As a syntactic phenomenon, it is independent from meaning, but its relationship with semantic information is very intricate. Moreover, grammatical genders can influence cognition. First, it has an effect on object categorization and perceptual similarity. People are more likely to judge two objects whose grammatical genders consistently belong to the same category. Pictures and objects which share the same grammatical gender are perceived to be more similar. Second, grammatical genders can facilitate and inhibit cognitive processing. Which role it plays depends on whether tasks require the information of grammatical genders. For example, in the task of naming noun phrases, which requires that the determiners＇ grammatical gender is consistent with that of the nouns on the syntactic, shorter naming latencies for pictures with grammatically consistent distractor words than for consistent ones. Otherwise, in the task of naming picture with words, the grammatical gender interference effect of the distractor word is observed. Third, it may also affect the second language learning and memory. The impact of grammatical genders on cognition is mediated by multiple factors including language, task, the morphological transparency for gender and so on. In addition, to explore the mechanisms by which grammatical gender might affect cognition has important significance. In terms of conceptual representation, the similarity and gender hypothesis and the sex and gender hypothesis interpret the mechanisms by grammatical gender affecting cognition from the perspective of language development. The basic idea of the similarity and gender hypothesis is that words that have similar syntactic and morphophonological properties also tend to have similar meanings. Nouns that share the same gender are used in the same linguistic contexts, which differs from those contexts in which nouns of a different gender are used. The sex and gender hypothesis is based on the established associations between gender of nouns and sex. It assumes that there is a core correspondence between genders of nouns and sex of their referents for humans, and people can extend this principle to encompass other nouns because there is no direct correspondence but they still refer to sexuated entities. Another alternative mechanism is the double selection （DS） model. It proposes that the locus where meaning and gender interact can be located at the level of the lexical representation specifies syntactic information. Nouns that share the same grammatical gender activate each other, thus facilitating their processing and speeding up responses, either to semantically related pairs or to semantically unrelated pairs. These explanations can provide an in- depth theoretical basis for us to better understand the relationship between language and cognition. Finally, recommendations for future research are discussed, based on this literature review.