Özet:

Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. However, in terms of biological gender, it can be said that lexical/semantic gender is reflected to nouns lexically. Although Turkish has no grammatical gender, it does have various means based on semantic system in which nouns are assigned to a gender according to its referent’s biological sex to recognize gender. It can also be said that there is a covert gender marking that denotes some person reference words as masculine or feminine. The aim of this study is to describe the phenomenon of associative gender, which carries the social-psychological context, in the case of certain categories (colour, animal, vegetable/fruit, clothing, body, transportation, sports, profession, material and natural features/plants). Also it was aimed at see the current associative gender perceptions of the lexicalized covert words (e.g., hemşire ‘nurse’, gömlek ‘shirt’) based on the assumption that the associative gender perception of sociocultural context may change in parallel with social changes. For this aim, how participants from different age groups (N 400) perceive the gender in Turkish is researched. A survey consisting of close-ended questions with 3 rating scale (masculine, feminine, neutral) for each category was conducted. The most general conclusion in this study is that in the associative gender assignment, neutral is dominant. This is followed by male and female dominance. In terms of the context of database, gender bias varies from masculine-feminine to neutral when the process from childhood to adulthood is looked at. In other words, while the children's perspective in marking gender is more towards masculine-feminine, the characteristics of the language appear more prominently and the tendency to assign gender decreases with age. Another consequence is male participants marked more masculine than female participants. This may be identified with the social gender perception.

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