Linguistic relativity and grammatical number: a comparison of native Slovenian and native English speakers

The theory of linguistic relativism suggests that language influences the way we think. Evidence supporting this theory has been found in the domains of grammatical gender, frames of reference, spatial categories, and noun types (Reinez & Prinz, 2009). The present study aims to extend this evidence into another domain, the grammatical number. The methodology and the idea stem from research done by Phillips & Boroditsky (2003). They tested whether the grammatical gender of inanimate objects leads people to think of them as having a gender. They found the effects of grammatical gender on people's perceptions of objects in a variety of settings. Boroditsky's other experiments have also found effects of linguistic relativity in representations of space, time, and substances. My study investigates whether grammatical number also shows effects of linguistic relativity by exploring the differences in cognition between native speakers of a language with a 2-way number system (English) and native speakers of a language with a 3-way number system (Slovenian).

 

The primary hypothesis is that Slovenian native speakers group together pictures of two items more often than native English speakers because the dual number category is more prominent in Slovenian native speakers' mental representations. Native English speakers are hypothesised to group together items by type more often than by number. Dual and nondual dialects of Slovenian are also compared to exclude confounding by the possible cultural differences between the English and the Slovenian participants.

 

The experiment was carried out online using Qualtrics survey software. A grouping task was used to explore whether there is a difference between Slovenian and English native speakers' mental categories. There were six conditions in which 36 pictures were arranged. The critical conditions were the ones with a dual and plural contrast. Pictures were representing equal amounts of human, animal and object items. Half were of masculine and half of feminine grammatical gender in Slovenian, to ensure a balanced design. The design for ensuring balanced conditions was Latin square, and factorial ANOVA was used for the data analysis.

 

There was no significant difference in grouping choice between the English and Slovenian group over all items. A slight correlation was found in the human pictures' condition, which suggests that dual affects mental representations of human items more than object and animal items. There was a slight effect of dialect found, which needs to be explored further. A big limitation was the significant effect of the device used for solving the survey. People grouped the pictures differently because they solved the survey on the phone instead of the computer.

 

There was no evidence found in favour of linguistic relativism in the domain of the grammatical number. The findings offer some compelling grounds for further research.

This individual article from the Proceedings is published here.