The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• The 'gender-congruency' effect describes how grammatical gender influences spoken word recognition.
• Understanding cross-language interactions is crucial for comprehending bilingual language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the 'gender-congruency' effect in Italian-Spanish bilinguals using a spoken-word recognition task.
• To examine whether grammatical gender in one language affects processing when it differs in another language.
• To explore the role of definite articles in anticipating word selection for bilinguals.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the visual world paradigm to track eye movements.
• Monitored eye movements of Italian-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals.
• Presented participants with object pairs and Spanish spoken instructions, manipulating grammatical gender congruence between Italian and Spanish.

Main Results:

• Bilinguals exhibited reduced target object fixation for gender-incongruent pairs, indicating between-language gender competition.
• Monolinguals did not show this gender-congruency effect.
• Bilinguals increased target object fixation when the definite article cued correct selection in the different-gender condition.

Conclusions:

• Grammatical gender information from one language can interfere with spoken word recognition in another language for bilinguals.
• Bilinguals demonstrate sensitivity to cross-linguistic grammatical gender differences, leading to competition effects.
• Definite articles play a role in facilitating word anticipation and mitigating gender competition in bilinguals.