Abstract

This research project aimed to discover how English monolingual speakers interpret the idea of grammatical gender, and if they have an innate bias toward associating common English nouns to the masculine gender. My hypothesis was that participants would assign a masculine grammatical gender to words at a greater than chance due to an existent internalized genderism/sexism within the participants. To gather data, a Qualtrics survey was designed to test participants. Said survey was limited to people who only speak English and contained 10 different common nouns. After the presentation of each noun, participants were given two options: masculine or feminine. They had to indicate the perceived gender per each noun. After gathering the data, the number of words the participants assign as masculine were compared against the expected value of 5 out of 10 using a one-way chi-square analysis. The proportion of common English nouns assigned to the masculine gender, (M = 5.52, SD = 1.2) differed from chance, 2(1, N = 113) = 38.6, p = .00001. Additionally, the results of the study hinted toward English monolingual speakers having biases when assigning gender to common English nouns – assigning masculine more than feminine to the list of nouns. These findings may also be indicative of possible sexist/genderist believes in English monolingual speakers when conceptualizing language.

Recommended Citation

De Gregorio, Diego (2022) "Interpretation of Grammatical Gender Among English Monolingual Speakers," Undergraduate Psychology Research Methods Journal: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/psych_journals/vol2/iss1/4