语法性别对认知的影响及其机制

语法性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、语法性透明度等因素调节。语法性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的认知机制、二语学习中语法性习得的认知过程、语法性不同形式性别差异影响的机制。

Grammatical Gender Effects and Mechanisms on Cognition

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. In some gendered languages, the link between grammatical gender and word meaning appears to be completely unpredictable. It appears to be functionally independent from conceptual structure and is assumed to be stored at a representational level that is different from that specifying semantic information. Nevertheless, in several cases, gender classification systems seem to be based on relevant semantic properties of the nouns’referents, for example, bio- logical sex or animacy. Moreover, grammatical gender can influence cognition. First, it has an effect on object categorization and perceptual similarity. People are more likely to judge two objects whose grammatical gender are consistent belong to the same category than they are inconsistent. Pictures and objects which share the same grammatical gender are perceived more similarity. Second, grammatical genders can facilitate and inhibit cognitive processing. Which role it plays depends on whether tasks require the information of grammatical gender. For example, in the task of naming noun phrases, which requirements the determiners’ grammatical gender is consistent with nouns’ one on the syntactic, the consistency effect of the grammatical gender of the distractor word that is written on the target picture is observed. Namely, shorter naming latencies for pictures with gramatically consistent distractor words than for consistent ones. Otherwise, in the task of naming picture with word , the grammatical gender interference effect of the distractor word is observed. That is to say naming times are slower to picture-word noun pairs s haring the same gender. Third, it may also affect the second language learning and memory. The impact of grammatical gender 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 the level 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 differ from those contexts in which nouns of a different gender are used. the sex and gender hypothesis is based on establishing associations between gender of nouns and sex. It assumes 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 for which there is no direct correspondence but which still refer to sexuated entities. Another alternative mechanisms 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 that specifies syntactic information: Nouns sharing 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 explanation can provide an in-depth theoretical basis for us to better understand the relationship between language and cognitive. Finally, recommendations for future research were discussed, based on this literature review.