Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Empirical evidence shows that gendered languages influence speaker's perception of the gender of animate and inanimate nouns. In this framework, we aimed to explore whether gram-matical gender can override gender stereotypes. One hundred fourteen native Greek speakers whose second language was English were asked to match stereotypically male- and female-associated nouns presented in Greek or in their English trans-lation with a male or female face. The nouns denoted agency and communality. Participants were presented with nouns both congruent and incongruent in terms of conceptual and gram-matical gender. Responses for both Greek and English nouns were provided consistently with gender stereotypes. Critically, although responses were not dominated by grammatical gender, for female-associated nouns, the presence of grammatically masculine gender reduced female responses. Moreover, participants assigned a male face faster for male-associated nouns than for female associated nouns irrespective of grammatical gender.