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

Abstract

The present study examines whether processing a word in one language is affected by the grammatical gender of its translation equivalent in another language. To this end, a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a translation–recognition task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants were presented with Catalan and Spanish pairs of words and had to decide if they were translation equivalents. Correct translations included words that were gender congruent (estiuMAS/veranoMAS–summer) or gender incongruent (tardorFEM/otoñoMAS–autumn). The behavioral results showed that participants were faster and more accurate in the gender-congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. The ERP data showed a reduced N400 for the congruent condition. The facilitative effect of gender congruency observed in this study constitutes evidence of the obligatory access to grammatical gender information during bare noun processing and suggests that the bilinguals’ gender systems interact, even in highly proficient early bilinguals.

Language balance rather than age of acquisition: A study on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect in Portuguese–German bilinguals

“…This occurs largely because these factors directly influence the degree of proficiency of the speaker in each language (e.g., Dussias & Sagarra, 2007;Levy et al, 2007; but for more detail, see Van Hell & Tanner, 2012). Therefore, whether or not a cross-linguistic GCE is observable should depend mainly on the degree of proficiency in each language, and being an early bilingual should not be an impediment to language interaction happening (for a study in language comprehension that supports this prediction, see Paolieri et al, 2020). In fact, many studies assume that AoA effects may be leveled by increasing proficiency (see Gagarina & Klassert, 2018).…”

Differential Object Marking in Structurally Complex Contexts in Spanish: Evidence from Bilingual and Monolingual Processing

“…These two languages share many phonological, syntactic, and semantic features, as well as numerous lexical items. Linguistic similarity serves as a catalyst for crosslinguistic influence (CLI), prompting researchers to investigate CLI between Catalan and Spanish (Bel and García-Alcaraz 2018;Davidson 2012;Paolieri et al 2020;Perpiñán 2018;Perpiñán and Soto-Corominas 2021, among others). This phenomenon has led some scholars to propose the existence of a Catalan bilingual variety (Boix and Sanz 2008), particularly in Catalonia, a historically bilingual region where both languages are co-official and commonly used in everyday communication.…”

Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias

“…To further explore the online processing of the stereotype, Siyanova-Chanturia et al (2012) and Pesciarelli et al (2019) measured the electrophysiological response evoked in the gender-priming paradigm. The authors focused on the N400 component, a negative-going deflection, in this case, peaking around 400 ms after stimulus onset, typically modulated by violations of semantic information and world knowledge ( Van Petten and Kutas, 1990 ) and by lexical incongruence ( Friederici and Jacobsen, 1999 ; Paolieri et al, 2020 ). Siyanova-Chanturia et al (2012) and Pesciarelli et al (2019) also examined the P300 component, an indicator of the subjective probability of eliciting an event.…”