Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

Abstract

In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing behavioral studies of mainly late second language (L2) learners on the so-called gender congruency (GC) effect (facilitated processing for translation equivalents with the same gender, in comparison to those with a different gender) in L2 production and comprehension. The majority of the results showed a GC effect, regardless of the type of language involved. However, the state of cognateness of the target nouns, as well as the similarity between the gender systems of the bilingual speakers and their L2 proficiency, modulated the results. Interestingly, a gender agreement context is not required in order to observe gender effects, in that they are also observed with bare nouns. Overall, the findings support an integrative view of bilingual gender representation, with competitive and inhibitory processes at different levels of language processing underlying cross-language GC effects.

L1 Grammatical Gender Variation through the Representation in the Lexicon

“…Brouwera et al, 2017 ; Dussias et al, 2013 ; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019 ; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010 ). Representational studies examining a variety of different languages (for a review, see Klassen, 2016 ; Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ) have consistently treated native adult speakers of each language as a homogeneous group. This can be problematic, for the following reasons: (1) There are numerous linguistic contexts in which language variation clearly affects the use of grammatical gender, and (2) not allowing for the possibility that native speakers have different representations even in their L1(s) also runs counter to recent findings in bilingualism research regarding the impact of individual differences (e.g.…”

Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition in School-Age Spanish-English Bilingual Children

“…Additionally, there may be a difference in Romance language article acquisition vs. Dutch as Spanish has a more transparent gender system (typically -o ending for masculine nouns and -a ending for feminine nouns) (see for e.g., Pérez-Pereira, 1991 ; Sá-Leite et al, 2020 ). Although there are exceptions to the endings of masculine and feminine nouns, and there are opaque endings as well (-e ending), overall, gender acquisition and processing is facilitated by these regularities (Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ). Dutch, on the other hand, has an opaque gender system where grammatical gender values are either “common” or “neuter” (Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Although there are exceptions to the endings of masculine and feminine nouns, and there are opaque endings as well (-e ending), overall, gender acquisition and processing is facilitated by these regularities (Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ). Dutch, on the other hand, has an opaque gender system where grammatical gender values are either “common” or “neuter” (Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ). For example, in Dutch, “de fiets [the bicycle]” is common and “het huis [the house]” is neuter.…”

The gender congruency effect in Catalan–Spanish bilinguals: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

“…Furthermore, these effects have been reported both between highly similar languages, such as Spanish and Italian, and between dissimilar languages, such as Russian and Spanish (Paolieri et al, 2019). Importantly, the effects seem to be obtained not only when gender agreement is required but also with bare nouns (see Sá-Leite, Fraga & Comesaña, 2019, for a review of this line of research and the main variables investigated). These findings provide support to the idea that grammatical gender is an intrinsic lexical feature that is available even when agreement is not required (Paolieri et al, 2019).…”

“…Although most influential models of language processing in bilinguals do not speak explicitly about gender, they propose an integrated lexicon (e.g., BIA+ model; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002 and Multilink; Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, Van Halem, Al-Jibouri, De Korte & Rekké, 2019) or a direct influence between the two languages at the level of lexical representations (RHM; Kroll & Stewart, 1994). For that reason, gender effects can be explained in the context of cross-language interactions at every level of lexical access (see also Sá-Leite et al, 2019 for a review).…”