Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14 (2), 2011, 203–220 C  Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S1366728910000179 Does learning Spanish grammatical gender change English-speaking adults’ categorization of inanimate objects? ∗ ELENA KURINSKI Saint Cloud State University, St. Cloud MARIA D. SERA University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (Received: January 18, 2009; final revision received: December 31, 2009; accepted: January 22, 2010; First published online 2 December 2010) Second language acquisition studies can contribute to the body of research on the influence of language on thought by examining cognitive change as a result of second language learning. We conducted a longitudinal study that examined how the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender influences categorization in native English-speaking adults. We asked whether learning the grammatical gender of Spanish affects adult native English speakers’ attribution of gender to inanimate objects. College students enrolled in beginning Spanish participated in two tasks repeatedly (four times) throughout one academic year. One task examined their acquisition of grammatical gender. The other examined their categorization of inanimate objects. We began to observe changes in participants’ grammatical gender acquisition and in categorization after ten weeks of Spanish instruction. Results indicate that learning a second language as an adult can change the way one categorizes objects. However, the effect of Spanish grammatical gender was more limited in Spanish learners than in native Spanish speakers; it was not observed for all kinds of objects nor did it increase with learners’ proficiency, suggesting that adults learning Spanish reach a plateau beyond which changes in categorization do not occur. Keywords: language–thought relations, categorization, Spanish grammatical gender, second language learning, language and cognition Does the language that people speak influence the way they think? Since ancient times, the relation between language and thought has intrigued philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and other researchers. The classical standpoint with regard to this issue is that thought precedes language. According to Aristotle, “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience” (n.d.). An alternative view was proposed by Edward Sapir (1884– 1939) and his disciple Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941). Sapir believed that “[h]uman beings . . . are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society” (1929, p. 209). Sapir laid the groundwork for the Linguistic Relativity * This research was supported in part by a small grant from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota. The authors would like to thank Professor Carol Klee for her helpful comments and professional support. A portion of this work is based on Elena Kurinski’s doctoral dissertation, “Gender Attribution by Adult Native English Speakers Learning Spanish”. We extend our thanks to dissertation committee members Francisco Ocampo and Timothy Face. Some of the data from this study were presented at the V International Conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association in Murcia, Spain (October 2006). Address for correspondence: Elena Kurinski, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, St. Cloud State University, 113 Lawrence Hall, 720 Fourth Avenue South, St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498 ekurinski@stcloudstate.edu Hypothesis, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Early evidence from color perception in the early 1970s appeared to contradict the hypothesis, which was labeled as circular, non-testable and probably false by several prominent scholars (e.g., Fodor, Bever & Garret, 1974; Pinker, 1995; Reddy, 1979). However, in recent decades, interest in Sapir–Whorf ideas has revived and numerous studies across a variety of linguistic domains and using a variety of methods suggest that language affects cognition. Evidence suggests that language affects conceptual development (e.g., de Villiers & de Villiers, 2003; Lohman & Tomasello, 2003; Sera, Bales & Del Castillo Pintado, 1997; Sera, Reittinger & Del Castillo Pintado, 1991; Waxman, 1990), categorization (e.g., Athanasopoulos, 2007; Bassetti, 2007; Boroditsky, Schmidt & Phillips, 2003; Flaherty, 2001; Kuo & Sera, 2009; Lucy, 1992; Lucy & Gaskins, 2003; Sera, Berge & Del Castillo Pintado, 1994; Sera, Leieff, Forbes, Clark-Burch, Rodriguez & Poulin-Dubois, 2002; Sera, Gathje & Del Castillo Pintado, 1999), spatial representations (Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Flaherty, 1998; Hermer-Vasquez, Spelke & Katsnelson, 1999; Hill, 1974; Levinson, 1996), event memory (Naigles, Eisenberg,