Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

• Published in: Psychonomic bulletin & review Vol. 26; no. 4; pp. 1148 - 1173
• Main Authors: Dias, Ana Rita Sá Leite, Fraga, Isabel, Comesaña, Montserrat
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer 01-08-2019; Springer US; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Bilingualism; Ciências Sociais; Cognitive Psychology; Comprehension; Educação de qualidade; Gender; Gender congruency effect; Gender differences; Gender Identity; Gender representation and processing; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical gender; Humans; Language; Language processing; Linguistics; Multilingualism; Nouns; Phonology; Psicologia; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Second language learning; Semantics; Social Sciences; Theoretical Review; Bilingualism; Gender congruency effect; Gender representation and processing
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/s13423-019-01596-8

In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing behavioral studies of mainly late second language (L2) learners on the so-called gender congruency (GC) effect (facilitated processing for translation equivalents with the same gender, in comparison to those with a different gender) in L2 production and comprehension. The majority of the results showed a GC effect, regardless of the type of language involved. However, the state of cognateness of the target nouns, as well as the similarity between the gender systems of the bilingual speakers and their L2 proficiency, modulated the results. Interestingly, a gender agreement context is not required in order to observe gender effects, in that they are also observed with bare nouns. Overall, the findings support an integrative view of bilingual gender representation, with competitive and inhibitory processes at different levels of language processing underlying cross-language GC effects.
This paper was funded by the Government of Spain-Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports– through the Training program for Academic Staff (Ayudas para la Formación del Profesorado Universitario, FPU grant BOE-B-2017-2646), the research project with reference PSI2015-65116-P granted by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the grant for research groups with reference GRC 2015/006 given by the Galician Government. This paper was funded by the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal) through the state budget with reference IF / 00784/2013 / CP1158 / CT0013. The study has also been partially supported by the FCT and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653).