Abstract:
There are a lot of research works that study grammatical categories in order to test the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, which states that speakers of languages with different grammatical categories have different ways of thinking. However, those studies mostly test monolingual speakers and seem to overlook bilingual speakers. Concerning the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, Whorf said that the more languages a person speaks, the more impartial in thought he would become. This makes me curious to see how a bilinguals grammatical categories influence his/her thought. Besides, very few past studies focus on grammatical gender in Russian language. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the relationship between grammatical gender of nouns and cognitive behavior in object categorization of Russian speakers, English speakers, and Russian-English bilinguals in order to test the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. It is hypothesized that speakers of Russian, a gendered language, categorize objects according to grammatical gender more than speakers of English, which is a genderless language and that Russian-English bilinguals categorize objects according to grammatical gender less than Russian speakers, but more than English speakers. The data was taken from an object categorization experiment, in which the participants consisting of 39 Russian speakers, 30 English speakers, and 54 Russian-English bilinguals, were asked to select one of the 3 pictures in each set that is different from the other two. The results show that Russian speakers categorized objects by grammatical gender more than English speakers, which supports the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. As for Russian-English bilinguals, they categorized objects by grammatical gender less than Russian speakers, but there was no difference when compared to English speakers. The results show the influence of bilingualism with second language proficiency on the bilinguals cognition.