Is That "Mr." or "Ms." Lemon? An Investigation of Grammatical and Semantic Gender on the Perception of Household Odorants

Abstract

Linguistic relativism is the idea that the structure of language influences thought. The present study investigates linguistic relativism by asking whether people who speak a gendered language think of objects in a way that is consistent with the grammatical gender (more masculine or feminine) more than people who speak a language without that linguistic feature. Odorants are unique stimuli for examining this question, because they carry a semantic gender without a biological one, yet gender is thought to be a central dimension of their perception. Canadian participants in the present study (native French or native English speakers) described a set of labeled odorants that varied systematically in grammatical and semantic gender to produce an implicit gender measure and also explicitly rated them for gender. Analysis of the implicit femininity contained in participants' descriptions showed a tendency for both native French and native English speakers to produce descriptions that were consistent with semantic gender; moreover, there were no effects of grammatical gender on implicit or explicit ratings. These results suggest that in a bilingual culture, French speakers may have been influenced by the anthropomorphism associated with odorants rather than grammatical gender.

Keywords: anthropomorphized gender; grammatical gender; household odors; language; olfaction.

Figure 1

The areas in the box on the x-axis indicate the odorants that are mismatched between semantic gender and French grammatical gender. The bars reflect the mean implicit femininity score, and the error bars represent the standard error.

Figure 2

Figure depicts the mean explicit VAS or gLMS ratings of odorants selected a priori to be semantically masculine and feminine, with the error bars showing the standard error of the mean. All ratings were normalized to be on a 0–100 scale (pleasantness was actually rated from −100 to 100).