2019/04/22 by Ana Rita Sá-Leite, Isabel Fraga, Montserrat Comesaña · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Second Language Acquisition and Learning
paper · pdf · doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01596-8
crossref issued 2019/04/22 · crossref published 2019/04/22 · crossref published-online 2019/04/22 · openalex publication_date 2019/04/22 · crossref created 2019/04/22 · crossref published-print 2019/08/01 · crossref deposited 2024/07/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
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.