Food for psycholinguistic thought on gender in Dutch and German: A literature review on L1 and L2 production and processing

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore how variation in the expression of gender has been and can be exploited to study gender perception in speakers of Dutch and German. We provide an up-to-date literature review on descriptive and psycholinguistic research on gender for these languages, considering empirical studies on both native (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. This paper contributes to placing existing literature on gender in Dutch and German in a comparative mode and to offering a concrete rationale (e.g., three lines of enquiry) to move the psycholinguistic study of language, cognition and gender forward.