When English speakers anthropomorphize animals or objects, they refer to such entities using human pronouns (e.g., he or she instead of it). Unlike English, which marks gender only for humans, gendered languages such as French grammatically mark gender not only for humans but also for nonhumans. Research has shown that in gendered languages, although gender marking of nonhuman nouns is semantically arbitrary, people ascribe male and female properties to nonhuman entities consistent with their grammatical gender. Because grammatical gender conveys human-related properties, we question whether grammatically gender-marking nonhumans may elicit anthropomorphism tendencies. Across six studies, we show that gender marking of nonhuman nouns in gendered languages influences the way individuals mentally represent these entities and increases their anthropomorphism tendencies. We demonstrate the effects both by comparing anthropomorphism as a function of natural differences in languages with French-English bilinguals (Study 1) and by training native English speakers to use gender marking for nonhuman nouns as speakers of gendered languages do (Study 2). The following studies further demonstrate the effects within the French language by measuring (Study 3a) and manipulating (Studies 3b and 4) the salience of gender markings of nonhuman nouns. In Study 5 (preregistered), we replicate our basic finding and establish grammatical gender as an important linguistic element in shaping French speakers' anthropomorphism tendencies. We discuss the findings and the limitations in the culture-language-cognition triad and layout their implications for the debate on the extent to which language can mediate categorical and perceptual judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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语法性别和拟人化：“它”取决于语言。

当说英语的人将动物或物体拟人化时，他们使用人类代词来指代这些实体（例如，用他或她代替它）。与只为人类标记性别的英语不同，法语等性别语言在语法上不仅为人类标记性别，也为非人类标记性别。研究表明，在性别语言中，尽管非人类名词的性别标记在语义上是任意的，但人们将男性和女性属性赋予非人类实体与其语法性别一致。由于语法性别传达了与人类相关的属性，因此我们质疑语法性别标记的非人类是否可能引发拟人化倾向。在六项研究中，我们表明，性别语言中非人类名词的性别标记会影响个体在心理上代表这些实体的方式，并增加他们的拟人化倾向。我们通过将拟人化作为语言自然差异的函数与法英双语者进行比较（研究 1），并通过训练以英语为母语的人像使用性别语言的人一样对非人类名词使用性别标记（研究 2）来证明其效果。以下研究通过测量（研究 3a）和操纵（研究 3b 和 4）非人类名词性别标记的显着性，进一步证明了法语中的影响。在研究 5（预注册）中，我们复制了我们的基本发现，并将语法性别确立为塑造法语使用者拟人化倾向的重要语言元素。我们讨论了文化-语言-认知三元组的发现和局限性，并阐述了它们对关于语言在多大程度上可以调节分类和感知判断的辩论的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2022 APA，保留所有权利）。