Grammatical gender, symbolic meaning, and gender concept: Recall, classification, and preference tests

It was hypothesized that Hebrew-speaking participants would be influenced by the assumed connotation more than by the grammatical gender of Hebrew stimulus words in recall, classification, and preference tests. Participants were 24 Israeli kindergarteners and 24 Israeli college students. Apart from a few exceptions, the participants performed as predicted, responding to meaning rather than to grammar. Similar results have been obtained in previous studies testing English-speaking populations. The findings suggest that grammatical gender plays a role only in tasks with a higher level of cognitive complexity, such as memory tasks.