How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in modern linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives which modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, we find that grammatical gender has a near-zero effect on adjective choice, thereby calling the neo-Whorfian hypothesis into question.

翻译：语法性别如何在跨语言中受到语义影响，是现代语言学与认知科学中的一个活跃研究领域。当前的研究方法旨在确定性别分配处于从完全任意决定到主要受语义决定的连续光谱中的哪个位置。针对后者，存在一种新沃尔夫假说的表述，该假说声称，即使是无生命名词的语法性别也会影响人们对物体的认知和描述方式（以用于修饰无生命名词的形容词选择作为意义的代理指标）。我们提出了一种新颖的因果图模型，该模型联合表示了名词的语法性别、其意义以及形容词选择之间的交互作用。与以往研究结果一致，我们发现名词的性别与其修饰形容词之间存在关联。然而，当控制名词的意义时，我们发现语法性别对形容词选择的影响近乎为零，从而对新沃尔夫假说提出了质疑。