The impact of language and culture on gender salience

Languages vary in the information they convey due to cross-linguistic differences in the structure of linguistic information. According to the Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), these cross-linguistic differences can affect speakers' cognitive processes (e.g., perception, memory, categorization). One linguistic feature that demonstrates distinct cross-linguistic differences is gender marking. For example, English speakers commonly code gender of the referent when using third person pronouns (she/he). The same is true of Polish, but in addition to gender information on pronouns, Polish also uses systematic gender information in surnames, job titles and other human descriptors (in a similar way an English speaker makes a distinction between, e.g., actor vs. actress, but for all occupations, whereas most are gender-neutral in English (e.g., accountant). On the other hand, Finnish does not systematically distinguish between males and females in human descriptors, and Finnish uses a gender-neutral animate pronoun 'hän' when referring to males and females. Thus, when referring to animate entities, syntactically, Finnish encodes human referents more like 'people' rather than men/women. These linguistic differences make these three languages (English, Finnish, Polish) ideal test cases for investigations as to whether linguistic differences affect cognitive processes. The fact that Polish, and English to a lesser extent, necessitates its speakers to pay attention to gender information and to retain this information in order to talk about human referents, Polish and English speakers may expend more cognitive resources processing and retaining gender information than Finnish speakers, who can omit this information. In addition to monolingual speakers (e.g., Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2017; Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011; Kirjavainen, Kite & Piasecki, 2020), studies investigating bilingual/second language speakers have shown Whorfian effects (e.g., Athanasopoulos, 2006; Borodistky, 2001; Cook, et al., 2006). These studi [...]