GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND OBJECT PERCEPTION OF ENGLISH-ARABIC BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Aljawharah Alotaibi

Abstract


The main purpose of this study was to investigate the possible effects of grammatical gender on objects perception. It examined how Arabic grammatical gender system can affect objects’ perception of Arabic native speakers. The sample of the study consisted of ninety eight English-Arabic bilingual children. A cognitive experiment was carried out in order to investigate gender effects (picture similarity task followed by confidence scale). The result of this study revealed that there was no effect of Arabic grammatical gender on object perception of the participants. The study revealed that Arabic-English bilingual speakers end up thinking about objects which are grammatical gender in Arabic as neutral depending on the object’s grammatical gender in their second language.

 

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linguistic relativity, language and thought, grammatical gender system

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v0i0.3003

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