A Series Of Study On The Gender Code Tendency Of Chinese Action Verbs And Its Effect On Cognition

Gender distinctions are crucial for every living being, and it is the most important basement of information arrangement. Recent researches show many languages have developed linguistic gender distinctions, and languages differ in linguistic gender distinctions. Some languages such as English and Chinese where gender is encoded in different pronouns only for referents having biological sex. Different from them, many languages, such as German, French, all nouns are marked for gender. Grammatical gender is an intrinsic syntactic property of words. In a gender marking language, the form of certain items-such as verbs, adjectives, determiners, etc.-is in accord with properties of nouns with gender mark. Recent years, Grammatical gender has attracted much attention in the fields of psycholinguistics, especially speech production and language comprehension.In this study, we designed a series of experiments to explore the gender code tendency of Chinese action verbs, and its effect on cognition. In Experiment 1, we explored the priming effect of verbs on word judge task. In Experiment 2, sentence completing task and eye tracking techniques were used to explore the effect of the gender code tendency of verbs on sentences processing. In Experiment 3, using the implicit Association(IAT), we investigated the effect of verbs on cognition.The results of experiments are demonstrated as following:1. Chinese action verbs have the gender code tendency, and this gender code tendency has a priming effect on word processing, especially those words with female code tendency. This effect may happen in 0-200ms.2. The gender information of action verbs could affect sentences processing on two aspects. On the one hand, The gender information of the predicate verb in a sentence could affect the choice of the subject when a pronoun is used as the subject of the sentence. Participants preferr the pronoun with the same gender as the predicate verb. Compared with incongruent conditions and no relation conditions, the choice takes less time in the gender congruent conditions. On the other hand, The gender information of the predicate verb can attain activation in the early of sentence processing. Data show that gender information attend sentence processing as soon as activated and accessed, and has a weak immediate effect in sentence comprehension especially the subject processing. The previous activation of the gender information of the subject of a sentence can affect the processing of the predicate verb.3. The fact that there is a significant IAT effect gives support to a clear effect of the gender information of verbs on cognition.