Sayaka Sato

University of Fribourg · Département de psychologie

Background/Objectives: Although the embodiment of action-related language is well-established in the mother tongue (L1), less is known about the embodiment of a second language (L2) acquired later in life through formal instruction. We used the high temporal resolution of ERPs and topographic ERP analyses to compare embodiment in L1 and L2 and to i...

Recently, researchers have started to experimentally investigate the claim that the grammaticalization of the future may impact our mental representations of future events. Yet, this research has mainly focused on the perceived distance of future events, although with inconclusive results. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the gra...

Theories of embodied cognition postulate that language processing activates similar sensory-motor structures as when interacting with the environment. Only little is known about the neural substrate of embodiment in a foreign language (L2) as compared to the mother tongue (L1). In this fMRI study, we investigated embodiment of motor and non-motor a...

The way the future is grammaticalized in language may influence the way we think about future events. However, recent experimental investigations have led to suspicions that this relationship may not be driven by the future tense alone. Rather than simply considering whether a language uses the future tense to mark the future, it has been suggested...

Although gender inclusive writing is widely polarised in public opinion, the exact causes of reluctance towards its use are not always clear. We explore the link between attitudes towards inclusive writing and different factors, such as the level of linguistic or historical knowledge of inclusive writing. We also measured the political orientation...

Psycholinguistic approaches that study the effects of language on mental representations have ignored a potential role of the grammaticalization of the future (i.e., how the future manifests linguistically). We argue that the grammaticalization of the future may be an important aspect, as thinking about the future is omnipresent in our everyday lif...

The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many ha...

We present a preliminary validation of a newly built questionnaire aimed at evaluating people’s openness towards the notion of non-binary gender. To explore the validity of our questionnaire, we ran a principal component analysis to evaluate the existence of three overarching dimensions (Gender Categories, Gender Fluidity, and Gender Definitions) t...

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we...

Considering how fundamental and ubiquitous temporal information is in discourse (e.g., Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), it seems rather surprising that the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on the way we perceive the future has only been scarcely studied. We argue that this may be due to its rather abstract nature and how it has been previous...

Two experiments assessed the extent to which grammatical gender provides a predictive basis for bilinguals' judgments about perceptual gender. In both experiments, French-English bilinguals and native English monolinguals were consecutively presented with images of objects manipulated for their (i) conceptual gender association and (ii) grammatical...

A critical question that has gained a resurgence of interest in recent years is the view that the languages we speak may be responsible for the way we think. In light of two theoretical approaches, linguistic relativity and the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, the present paper offers a review of the empirical methods and findings of research on t...

Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determin...

The generic use of masculine plural forms in grammatical gender languages has been criticised for activating unequal gender representations that are male dominant. The present study examined whether the recently introduced gender-neutral forms of nominalised adjectives and participles in German provide references that induce more balanced represent...

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group of wo...

RÉSUMÉ Dans cet article, nous présentons les recherches, relativement récentes, sur l'intégration du genre dans la représentation mentale d'une lectrice ou d'un lecteur, en mettant l'accent sur leurs controverses ainsi que sur les pistes encore peu (ou pas) explorées. Nous espérons ainsi susciter l'intérêt de la communauté francophone sur ce sujet,...

Dans cet article, nous présentons les recherches, relativement récentes, sur l’intégration du genre dans la représentation mentale d’une lectrice ou d’un lecteur, en mettant l’accent sur leurs controverses ainsi que sur les pistes encore peu (ou pas) explorées. Nous espérons ainsi susciter l’intérêt de la communauté francophone sur ce sujet, jusqu’...

Guidelines for a gender-fair use of the languages represented in the ITN LCG network were analyzed comparatively for specific criteria. All institutional or governmental guidelines aim at attenuating male-biased representations that are brought about by certain grammatical structures of the respective language. These guidelines primarily focus on t...