Three time-scales of influence between linguistic and conceptual processing: grammatical gender effects in Polish and Italian

An increasing number of studies show that syntactic features of language influence processing of information about objects and events, although the issues of universality and depth of such influences continue to fuel debates. This study compared effects of grammatical gender on the description of objects in two languages, Polish and Italian, that differ in the number of grammatical gender categories and in the systematicity of mapping between grammatical gender and natural gender of human referents. Combining two methods previously employed by research on this topic, we used an adjective description task followed by an Osgood-type rating of the collected adjectives. Grammatical gender effects were found in both languages. Previous findings, suggesting that semantic effects are weaker for languages with 3 genders, were not confirmed, prompting a search for other decisive factors. Importantly, the effects of grammatical features probed by our task can be understood as acting on different time-scales: the on-line influence of the processing of linguistic material, the ontogenetic time-scale of concept formation in the presence of linguistic input, and, finally, the time-scale of cultural language evolution. Depending on the experimental task adopted, effects from different time-scales may interact which is rarely taken into account by existing explanatory models.