L1 Grammatical Gender Variation through the Representation in the Lexicon

In most studies on gender processing, native speakers of the same language are treated as a homogeneous group. The current study investigates to what extent an ongoing change in the gender system of Norwegian (a development from three to two genders, involving the loss of feminine) may be reflected in processing. We carried out a gender decision task in which speakers were presented with 32 nouns of each gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and asked to select the corresponding indefinite article. Based on these results, we identified three different groups: three-gender speakers, two-gender speakers, and an unstable gender use group that used feminine gender to varying degrees. This division corresponded with clear differences in RTs, the two-gender speakers being faster overall with no difference across conditions, the three-gender group being slower with masculine, and the unstable group being slower with both masculine and feminine. Thus, our results indicate that native speakers of the same language can in fact have different underlying representations of gender in the lexicon.