The role of Russian grammatical gender in the perception of first-person singular English texts by Russian speakers of English

Previous research into effects of grammatical gender on perception among speakers of different languages has mostly investigated object categorisation. Seemingly no research has been conducted into whether grammatical gender can affect the perception of the sex of the narrator of an English text. The present mixed-methods study explored whether the category of the grammatical gender of nouns in the Russian language provides a predictive basis for the judgments of Russian speakers of English about the perceptual sex of the narrator in first-person singular English texts. The online survey method was adopted to collect data. The study involved two groups of participants: L1 English and L1 Russian speakers. The L1 English speakers consisted of 29 participants, representing speakers of five English varieties. The L1 Russian speaker group included 133 participants residing in Kazakhstan. The 29 L1 English participants and 71 L1 Russian participants were assigned to a narrator’s sex questionnaire, wherein they were asked to read six test texts and ascertain the narrator’s sex by choosing an answer from three options. The participants were also asked to provide comments explaining their choices. The remaining 62 L1 Russian participants were assigned to a translation questionnaire, wherein they were asked to translate the same six test texts and an additional control text from English into Russian. The test texts were designed using sex-neutral nouns, whose sex-unbiased connotations were ascertained through a nouns sorting questionnaire among English and Russian speakers that had preceded the narrator’s sex and translation questionnaires. The analysis of the quantitative data consisted of descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk test, the Mann-Whitney U test, the chi-square test for goodness of fit, and the two-way group independence chi-square test. The qualitative data were content-analysed with respect to the rationale behind participants’ responses. The results of the study showed that Russian grammatical gender made no significant difference to the perception of the narrator’s sex by Russian speakers of English. L1 Russian participants of the study were observed to perceive the narrator’s sex differently depending on whether the task explicitly required them to choose from three alternatives or elicited their assumptions without their conscious awareness. L1 Russian male participants were found to tend to attribute their own sex to the narrator only in the narrator’s sex questionnaire. No such association was witnessed for L1 Russian female participants in either questionnaire. The study revealed no effect of L1 Russian participants’ English language proficiency on their perception of the narrator’s sex. L1 English participants, who served as a control group providing a baseline comparison, were not affected by Russian grammatical gender, perceiving the sex of the narrator of the texts arbitrarily. The study provides pedagogical recommendations for presenting first-person singular English texts to Russian speakers of English in English language teaching settings, as well as suggestions for further research work.