Grammatical gender and cognition

Empirical research on "structural relativity" (Lucy 1996) has indicated that the grammatical structuring of languages impacts on speakers' thinking. In particular, the experimental investigation of the relationship between grammatical gender and cognition has repeatedly brought evidence to correlations between the two. Some researchers argue, however, that grammatical gender effects appear only in languages with a two-gender system. Others suggest that the language of instructions for the experiments affects speakers' performance of tasks. The present paper examines these two issues on the basis of experimental data from a three-gender language, Modern Greek, and suggests that the overall picture is not coherent on several levels