Linguistic Relativity: Transforming the Relative into the Insensible: a Reply to Clarke Et Al.1

I should like to respond to Clarke et al. concerning their recent paper entitled “Gender Perception in Arabic and English” which appeared in your journal, Language Learning, vol. 31, no. I , 1981. In this paper, the authors appear to have erred in several directions regarding logically and intuitively inappropriate interpretations of their data and offering an incorrect reading of the conclusion reached in Guiora et al. (1980) concerning the Michigan Personality and Language Research Group’s position on the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Over a number of years, the Michigan Personality and Language Research Group has investigated two distinct questions bearing on the relationship between grammatical structure and psychological phenomena: T o what extent does the amount of gender loading in a language affect (a) the age of gender identity attainment (see Guiora et al. 1981 and Paluszny et al. 1973) and (b) the assignment of meaning to essentially asexual objects (see Guiora and Sagi 1978 and Guiora et al. 1980). It is obvious that Clarke et al. have confused these two series of studies by stating, “The results of those studies indicated that adult speakers of English, Finnish, and Hebrew categorized object/concepts in essentially the same fashion regardless of the native language”(p. 159). N o Finnish subjects were ever used in the assignment of meaning studies, but only in the gender identity studies. The reader is referred to the original studies for a correct summary of the conclusions. The results from these two series of studies have shown that the age of gender identity attainment is affected by gender loading in the language while assignment of meaning to asexual objects/concepts is not. This has led to a modified reinterpretation of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis which states that linguistic features may have an effect o n the rate of some