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Flexing gender perception : Brain potentials reveal the cognitive permeability of grammatical information

Sato, Sayaka ; Casaponsa, Aina and Athanasopoulos, Panos LU (2020) In Cognitive Science 44(9).
Abstract
A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets... (More)
A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French–English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception. (Less)
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author
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publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
in
Cognitive Science
volume
44
issue
9
article number
e12884
publisher
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
external identifiers
  • scopus:85091127818
ISSN
0364-0213
DOI
10.1111/cogs.12884
language
English
LU publication?
no
id
ad9d3b54-0c62-4a62-9f03-611d327db32d
date added to LUP
2024-02-29 13:15:46
date last changed
2024-03-07 10:45:28
@article{ad9d3b54-0c62-4a62-9f03-611d327db32d,
  abstract     = {{A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French–English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception.}},
  author       = {{Sato, Sayaka and Casaponsa, Aina and Athanasopoulos, Panos}},
  issn         = {{0364-0213}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{9}},
  publisher    = {{Lawrence Erlbaum Associates}},
  series       = {{Cognitive Science}},
  title        = {{Flexing gender perception : Brain potentials reveal the cognitive permeability of grammatical information}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12884}},
  doi          = {{10.1111/cogs.12884}},
  volume       = {{44}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}