Gender processing in first and second languages: the role of noun termination

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times were statistically identical for items from gender typical, ambiguous, and gender atypical groups. The 2 experiments with English bilinguals who had learned German as a second language (L2), however, provided evidence that the L2 word's termination plays a role in L2 gender processing. Participants were fastest when producing gender-marked noun phrases containing a noun with a gender typical termination and slowest when the noun had a gender atypical termination. Analogous results were obtained in the grammaticality judgment experiment. These findings support the assumption that there is interaction between the levels of phonological encoding and grammatical encoding at least in bilingual processing.