Depressive symptomatology and language perception in young women

Abstract

Introduction

Depression may have numerous effects on cognition. A little investigated topic is the perception of the grammatical gender.

Objective

The aim of this study is to examine whether there is a different understanding of grammatical gender in Greek-speaking young women with and without depressive symptomatology regarding names of cars that are female or neutral according to the modern Greek language.

Method

Two-hundred fourteen women from Greece (Mean age = 19.59, SD age = 3.60, 18 min–50 max) were examined with the ZUNG Self Rating Depression Scale and a language test that comprised of 38 names of car brands, which were characterized in linguistics either as female or neutral. Half of women scored high in the ZUNG Depression scale.

Results

Results indicated that overall there are no statistically significant differences between women with or without depression in their gender perception of the words (P > .005). In addition to that, there are no statistically significant differences between the names of car brands that are related to large size cars and/or expensive car models.

Conclusions

This research suggests that although there is a tendency to consider the existence of depressive symptomatology as detrimental on cognition, this does not seem to hold true for the perception of the gender of the words as examined by linguistics.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.