John Narvaez
I recently watched a TED talk by Lera Boroditsky on how languages shape the way we think. One of her examples pointed out the relationship between grammatical gender and the perceptions that this notion creates in the minds of speakers of languages that use it. She mentioned how, for example, a Spanish speaker would associate stereotypically male words to describe nouns such as “bridge” (“puente”, a masculine noun) while German speakers would assign stereotypically feminine words to describe the same bridge because bridge in German is a feminine word.
I set out to test this idea and surveyed a few friends (5 male, 5 female) asking them to give me the first adjective or word that came to mind when I mentioned a mix of feminine and masculine nouns in Spanish. I chose 6 lexically-linked words: Puente (bridge), casa (house), iglesia (church), edificio (building), estadio (stadium) and piscina (pool). I have translated the results of my survey to share them with you and hopefully bring up some discussion on the implications of this issue in language teaching:
Continue reading “Mirror, mirror, do my lexical choices reflect gender stereotypes?”