Cross-language effects of grammatical gender in bilingual word recognition and production

Abstract

We investigated whether bilinguals recognizing or producing noun phrases in their second language Dutch are influenced by the grammatical gender in their mother tongue German. The Dutch nouns used in the experiments were either gender-'compatible' or -'incompatible' with their German translation. Furthermore, their cognate status (form similarity with the translation) was varied. In Experiment 1, participants carried out a gender-primed lexical decision task on Dutch nouns. In Experiment 2, the same items were presented as pictures and had to be named in Dutch, either with or without their gender-marked determiners. Experiment 3 was a repetition of Experiment 2, but with a preceding training session to obtain additional and more reliable data. In all three experiments, effects of cross-language gender compatibility were obtained, especially for cognates. These results suggest that a bilingual's two gender systems interact. Additional analyses indicate that this interaction primarily affects the stability of gender representations in the second language.