Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Grammatical gender is a linguistic feature influencing word processing.
• The gender congruency (GC) effect demonstrates facilitated processing for translation equivalents with matching genders.
• Previous research primarily focused on late second language (L2) learners.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review and analyze the representation and processing of grammatical gender in the bilingual mind.
• To synthesize findings from behavioral studies on the GC effect in L2 learners.
• To explore factors modulating the GC effect, such as cognateness and L2 proficiency.

Main Methods:

• Systematic review of 13 existing behavioral studies.
• Analysis of data from studies on L2 production and comprehension.
• Examination of the GC effect in various language pairs.

Main Results:

• A majority of studies reported a significant GC effect across different language types.
• Cognateness of nouns and similarity of gender systems modulated the GC effect.
• The GC effect was observed even with bare nouns, not requiring a gender agreement context.
• L2 proficiency influenced the magnitude of the GC effect.

Conclusions:

• Findings support an integrative model of bilingual gender representation.
• Competitive and inhibitory processes at multiple language levels underlie cross-language GC effects.
• Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon.