I have an article around somewhere about an experiment where speakers of different languages with gendered nouns were asked to describe various objects that had different genders in their languages (eg, say in French car is feminine and in German it's masculine). The result was that the gender of the noun did influence people's perception of the object - in my made up example, the French speakers were more likely to say things like "curvy" to describe a car, whereas the German speakers were more likely to say things like "powerful".