Rethinking Linguistic Relativity: an Experimental Study among Croatian Speakers

In recent years, research has been done in favour of neo-Whorfianism, an idea that language influences thought. Researchers like Boroditsky, Haertlé, Phillips, Sera, Berge and del Castillo Pintado have all contributed to the development of this field of study by conducting experiments on speakers of different languages like Spanish, German, English, French, and Polish. What they all have in common is the research done on the aspect of language that is grammatical gender and the role it has in the perception of inanimate objects and animals. Since their research did imply a correlation between a grammatical gender of a noun or the type of a noun (artificial or natural) and the perception of it in regards of its femininity and masculinity, I decided to replicate their studies by conducting an experimental study on the influence of language on thought among Croatian speakers (of English). Therefore, the focus of this paper is to further develop the research done by these researchers by replicating it on the Croatian speakers of English and exploring whether similar correlations would be found