The representation of asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon

Abstract

Previous research has led to conflicting notions of the representation of L1 and L2 grammatical gender systems in the mental lexicon: under the gender-integrated representation hypothesis the L1 and L2 gender nodes are shared, while these nodes are language-specific in the gender autonomous representation hypothesis. We address this debate, extending this research to L1 and L2 systems mismatched in number of gender values. In this study, Spanish-German bilinguals performed an L2 picture-naming task in which gender congruency (congruent, incongruent and neuter) between L1 and L2 nouns was manipulated. Latencies were shorter for gender-congruent than gender-incongruent nouns, and latencies for the German neuter nouns were also shorter than those for the masculine-feminine incongruent nouns. These gender congruency effects support the gender-integrated representation hypothesis and indicate a unique representation of the gender value not present in the L1 which interferes with the response significantly less than when the incongruency is between gender values present in both languages.