Can grammatical gender influence how people conceptualize
the referents of nouns? Using an implicit measure, we
investigated whether such an effect could be found in a task
where neither grammatical nor biological gender is
highlighted. In the current study, conducted in English,
speakers of French, German and Romanian with knowledge
of English were asked to generate adjectives they associate
with referents of nouns. Afterwards, the gender valence of the
adjectives was measured. The results showed that participants
generated more feminine adjectives for nouns with majority
feminine translations compared to nouns with majority
masculine translations. We found a stronger effect of
grammatical gender for some semantic categories than for
others. Significant effects of grammatical gender were present
starting with the 2nd adjective generated by participants
(effects were stronger for adjectives generated 2nd and 3rd by
participants, as opposed to the 1st adjective).