Linguistic Relativity and Grammatical Number: A Comparison between Native Slovenian and English Speakers

The theory of linguistic relativism suggests that language influences the way we think (Reinez & Prinz, 2009). The present study aims to extend the evidence into another domain, grammatical number. The methodology and idea stem from research by Phillips & Boroditsky (2003). My study investigated the differences in cognition between native speakers of a 2-way number system language (English) and native speakers of a 3-way number system language (Slovenian). The primary hypothesis was that Slovenians group pictures of two versus three by number, whereas the English group them by type. Dual and nondual dialects of Slovenian are also compared to exclude the possible cultural differences between the English and the Slovenian participants. The experiment was carried out online using Qualtrics survey software. A grouping task was used to explore whether there is a difference between Slovenian and English native speakers' mental categories. The design for ensuring balanced conditions was Latin square, and factorial ANOVA was used for the data analysis. There was no significant difference in grouping choice between the English and Slovenian group. There was a slight effect of dialect, which needs to be explored further. A big limitation was a significant effect of the device used for solving the survey on the groupings. There was no evidence found in favour of linguistic relativism in the domain of the grammatical number. The findings offer some compelling grounds for further research.