An Asexual Language Does Not Guide Our Thinking While Speaking
The international collaboration project shows that Finns think about the gender of people the same way as speakers of English although the asexual Finnish language doesn’t require it.
The researchers Kumiko Fukumura (University of Strathclyde, Scotland), Jukka Hyönä and Merete Scholfield (University of Turku, Finland) studied the effect of the use of personal pronouns on thinking during speaking. In English, she-pronoun is used to refer to women and he-pronoun to men. In Finnish language genders are not differentiated but hän-pronoun refers equally to both females and males.
- We wanted to find out, if Finns think about gender less as the English speakers, as our language does not require us to do so. However, our research results didn’t support this idea, tells Professor Jukka Hyönä from the University of Turku.
- In this sense, language does not determine our thinking when speaking.
Results with the Help of Stories
Finnish students who spoke Finnish as their first language and were also fluent English speakers took part in the study.
In the first part of the study, testees were told a beginning of a story in English, which they were then requested to continue in English. The story included both female and male characters.
The narratives of Finns were compared with the results of a corresponding research done in Scotland. The experiment demonstrated that Finns used English pronouns analogously with native English speakers. They used a noun instead of a pronoun clearly more often when both of the characters were of the same gender.
In fact, it was found that even in Finnish, the characters’ gender congruence affected pronoun use.
- It was interesting that in the experiment done in Finnish, the students significantly reduced the use of the hän-pronoun when they spoke about the characters of the same gender although it didn’t clarify the reference any more than in the situation with the characters of different gender, Hyönä says.
- Contrary to English, the hän-pronoun in Finnish is ambiguous regardless of whether it refers to two people of the same gender or of the different gender.
The results were published in the scientific magazine Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition.
>>Fukumura, K., & Hyönä, J., & Scholfield, M. (2013). Gender affects semantic competition: The effect of gender in a non-gender marking language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 39, 2012-1021.)
Text: HB
Photographs: ILRI and Henna Borisoff