What constrains grammatical gender effects on semantic judgements? Evidence from Portuguese

Four studies investigated whether grammatical gender biases the semantic judgements of Portuguese speakers, relative to speakers of English. Some research reports that grammatical gender has a pervasive influence on speakers' cognitive representations (e. g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Philips, 2003; Sera, Elieff, Forbes, Burch, & Rodriguez, 2002). Others argue that effects of grammar arise through linguistic processing (e. g., Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, & Dworzynski, 2005) and are restricted to animate categories for which gender is a pertinent feature. The present results found effects of gender in Portuguese speakers' judgements of inanimate objects, but only when gender was task relevant and/or when the stimuli were words, rather than pictures. These findings support the view that gender effects on cognitive judgements arise as a function of linguistic processing and/or task demands, rather than directly influencing conceptual or semantic representations.