Grammatical genders are a common phenomenon in many languages. As a syntactic phenomenon, it is independent from meaning, but its relationship with semantic information is very intricate. In some gendered languages, the link between grammatical gender and word meaning appears to be completely unpredictable. It appears to be functionally independent from conceptual structure and is assumed to be stored at a representational level that is different from that specifying semantic information. Nevertheless, in several cases, gender classification systems seem to be based on relevant semantic properties of the nouns’referents, for example, bio- logical sex or animacy. Moreover, grammatical gender can influence cognition. First, it has an effect on object categorization and perceptual similarity. People are more likely to judge two objects whose grammatical gender are consistent belong to the same category than they are inconsistent. Pictures and objects which share the same grammatical gender are perceived more similarity. Second, grammatical genders can facilitate and inhibit cognitive processing. Which role it plays depends on whether tasks require the information of grammatical gender. For example, in the task of naming noun phrases, which requirements the determiners’ grammatical gender is consistent with nouns’ one on the syntactic, the consistency effect of the grammatical gender of the distractor word that is written on the target picture is observed. Namely, shorter naming latencies for pictures with gramatically consistent distractor words than for consistent ones. Otherwise, in the task of naming picture with word , the grammatical gender interference effect of the distractor word is observed. That is to say naming times are slower to picture-word noun pairs s haring the same gender. Third, it may also affect the second language learning and memory. The impact of grammatical gender on cognition is mediated by multiple factors including language, task, the morphological transparency for gender and so on. 　　In addition, to explore the mechanisms by which grammatical gender might affect cognition has important significance. In the level of conceptual representation, the similarity and gender hypothesis and the sex and gender hypothesis interpret the mechanisms by grammatical gender affecting cognition from the perspective of language development. The basic idea of the similarity and gender hypothesis is that words that have similar syntactic and morphophonological properties also tend to have similar meanings. Nouns that share the same gender are used in the same linguistic contexts, which differ from those contexts in which nouns of a different gender are used. the sex and gender hypothesis is based on establishing associations between gender of nouns and sex. It assumes there is a core correspondence between genders of nouns and sex of their referents for humans, and people can extend this principle to encompass other nouns for which there is no direct correspondence but which still refer to sexuated entities. Another alternative mechanisms is the double selection (DS) model. It proposes that the locus where meaning and gender interact can be located at the level of the lexical representation that specifies syntactic information: Nouns sharing the same grammatical gender activate each other, thus facilitating their processing and speeding up responses, either to semantically related pairs or to semantically unrelated pairs.These explanation can provide an in-depth theoretical basis for us to better understand the relationship between language and cognitive. Finally, recommendations for future research were discussed, based on this literature review.