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Grammatical gender processing in Italian and Spanish bilinguals
Daniela Paolieri1, Roberto Cubelli, Pedro Macizo
1Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Trento, Italy. dpaolieri@ugr.es
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|February 26, 2010
Summary
Native language grammatical gender influences second language word production. Bilinguals showed faster responses when word genders matched between languages, suggesting cross-linguistic gender interaction.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Bilingualism Studies
- Cognitive Neuroscience
Background:
- Investigating the influence of native language (L1) grammatical gender on second language (L2) word production.
- Previous research presents conflicting evidence on this cross-linguistic interaction.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if L1 grammatical gender affects L2 word production in bilinguals.
- To examine this effect across different tasks and linguistic structures.
Main Methods:
- Italian-Spanish bilinguals participated in picture-naming and word-translation tasks.
- Stimuli included nouns with matching or mismatching genders across L1 and L2.
- Response times were measured for bare nouns and noun phrases.
Main Results:
- Responses were significantly faster when noun genders were congruent between L1 and L2.
- This effect remained consistent across both L2 picture naming and L1-to-L2 translation tasks.
- The congruency effect was observed for both bare nouns and noun phrases.
Conclusions:
- Native language grammatical gender interacts with lexical representations in the second language.
- A direct, non-semantic lexical route facilitates cross-linguistic gender effects in bilinguals.
- This suggests grammatical gender is a fundamental aspect of bilingual lexical organization.
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