Gramatical Gender of Nouns Impacts Cognition
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
Word choice is a giant lever for cognitive designers or anyone interested in impacting how people think and feel. But exactly how do words and phrases impact cognition? An interesting new finding is reported by NPR.
The bottom line is:
“…native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender”
If this finding holds up it gives us a powerful insight into how to tune word choice to invoke specific mental states and models based on gramatical gender. I won’t spoil the well presented examples in the story by trying to reproduce them here so check out the link above.
Thanks to Gina Farag at Northwestern for pointing this story out.
