Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many languages assign grammatical gender to inanimate and otherwise genderless nouns like key and hammer. Previousstudies of grammatical gender have largely considered it from the Whorfian perspective: examining mixed cases like keywhere disagreements on gender across languages enable researchers to ask whether linguistic gender influences genderassociations in cognition. This approach has sometimes presumed arbitrariness in grammatical gender assignments andneglected to consider cases like hammer where there is broad agreement on gender (masculine) across both Indo-Europeanlanguages and the intuitions of monolingual English speakers, who do not use grammatical gender but agree on themasculine nature of hammers (Foundalis, 2002). We reanalyze previous findings and present new data to assess whethercommon principles underlie both gender assignments in Indo-European languages and the gender associations of Englishspeakers. Additionally, we explore the role of semantic domain, usage, and semantic features in predicting grammaticalgender and gender association.