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Language linked to division of tasks? | ||
Tags: Scientific Research | Gender | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Clarity Groupie United States Joined 3521 days ago 85 posts - 107 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 4 14 April 2015 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I came across this article today and I'm interested to know everyone's thoughts on it. I'm a little skeptical, but then again I'm a speaker of only one language. The researchers were from universities in the U.S., France and Israel.
Hicks, D. L., Santacreu-Vasut, E., & Shoham, A. (2015). Does mother tongue make for women's work? Linguistics, household labor, and gender identity. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 110, 19-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2014.11.010 This paper studies the formation and persistence of gender identity in a sample of U.S. immigrants. We show that gender roles are acquired early in life, and once established, persist regardless of how long an individual has lived in the U.S. We use a novel approach relying on linguistic variation and document that households with individuals whose native language emphasizes gender in its grammatical structure are significantly more likely to allocate household tasks on the basis of sex and to do so more intensively. We present evidence of two mechanisms for our observed associations – that languages serve as cultural markers for origin country norms or that features of language directly influence cognition and behavior. Our findings do not appear to be driven by plausible alternatives such as selection in migration and marriage markets, as gender norms of behavior are evident even in the behavior of single person households. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 4 14 April 2015 at 8:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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For some odd reason Neo-Whorfian research seems to be en vogue among psychologists and economists these days. You probably remember M. Keith Chen's article, about a link between future forms and spending habits, which was debunked by leading linguists.
Unfortunately, the article is not available for free and the abstract is rather vague. If you have access to the whole article, can you summarize the methodology that was used and the languages that supposedly influenced gender identity. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 4 14 April 2015 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Because a whole lot of "research" is about some people publishing and making a name for themselves around some piece of nonsense they came up with, rather than actually finding out stuff? :)
I'm more than a bit skeptical. My thoughts? "Does mother tongue make for women's work?", etc. sounds so much like "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis yet again" that I won't spend a minute checking the article. Not very scientific on my part, you know, but just this once I'll take the risk to miss on something ;) Also, looking up Spair-Whorf at the forum should reveal everyone's previous thoughts on the subject, even if they won't bother to write about it again... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 4 of 4 14 April 2015 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hold your horses--the article doesn't actually make the Sapir-Whorf claim that many are skeptical of--it only
presents it as one of two plausible mechanisms for the correlation they observed between linguistic gender- marking and gender-role behavior:
It's sensible to argue that it's driven by cultures with gender role separation being more likely to develop gendered language, with little or no contribution from Sapir-Whorf. But, the fact that overblown claims have been made by the Whorfian side doesn't mean that no Whorfian-type effect exists of any kind. Such an effect might exist and be involved here, but this has been hard for scientists to verify because one can't experimentally manipulate the language people grow up speaking, and because the structure of one's language is inextricably associated with cultural attributes that don't have any inherent link to language. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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