The Importance of Gender in Language

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Language pervades everything in ways that we don't even know. We have these grammatical gender systems where every noun is masculine or feminine. Young kids who are learning Spanish or French as their first language will pick a boy voice or a girl voice depending on the grammatical gender of the noun. Adults will give you different descriptions of an object like a bridge depending on whether it's masculine or feminine in their language. So I think we believe the structures of our language is a lot more than we should.

What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.

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Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.

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