Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T09:30:05.253Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender congruency effects in Russian–Spanish and Italian–Spanish bilinguals: The role of language proximity and concreteness of words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2018

DANIELA PAOLIERI ,
FRANCISCA PADILLA ,
OLGA KORENEVA ,
LUIS MORALES  and
PEDRO MACIZO
DANIELA PAOLIERI*
Affiliation:
Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC); Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain
FRANCISCA PADILLA
Affiliation:
Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC); Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain
OLGA KORENEVA
Affiliation:
Department of Translation and Interpreting; University of Granada, Spain
LUIS MORALES
Affiliation:
Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Department of Psychology, Seville, Spain
PEDRO MACIZO
Affiliation:
Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC); Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Daniela Paolieri, Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, Department of Experimental Psychology, C/ Professor Clavera s/n, University of Granada18071, Granada, Spain[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals perform a production task faster when the item is gender-congruent across their two languages than when it is not. The current study aimed to explore three factors that might modulate this effect: the similarity of the gender systems, the need to retrieve grammatical gender to perform the task, and the role of a semantic variable (concreteness) in the processing of gender information. In Experiment 1, Russian–Spanish bilinguals showed gender-congruency effects whether they translated concrete nouns in isolation or in noun-phrases. In contrast, the effect was restricted to noun phrases when they translated abstract words. In Experiment 2, Italian–Spanish bilinguals showed the gender-congruency effect regardless of the translation task. However, the effect was larger with concrete nouns in comparison with abstract nouns. These results are discussed in terms of the proximity of bilingual gender systems and the relationship between semantics and gender.

Keywords

Gender congruencygender processing in bilingualslanguage proximityword concreteness
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 112 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This research was supported by grants PSI2013-46033-P, PCIN-2015-165-C02-01, PCIN-2015-132, PSI2016-75250-P and PSI2015-65502 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. We express our thanks to three anonymous reviewers who provided extremely detailed and useful critical commentary on a previous version of this paper.

References

Alameda, J. R., & Cuetos, F. (1995). Diccionario de frecuencias de las unidades lingüísticas del castellano. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.Google Scholar
Arias Barredo, A. (1990). Género gramatical y motivación semántica. Estudios de Lingüística Universidad de Alicante, 6, 107–121. doi:10.14198/ELUA1990.6.06Google Scholar
Arnott, D. W. (1967). Some reflections on the content of individual classes in Fula and Tiv. In Manessy, G. & Martinet, A. (Eds.), La classification nominale dans les langues négro-africaines (pp. 45–74). Paris: CNRSGoogle Scholar
Bajo, M. T., Cañas, J. J., Navarro, R., Padilla, F., & Puerta-MelguizoM., C. M., C. (1994). Variables estructurales en el recuerdo de palabras concretas y abstractas. Cognitiva, 6, 93–106.Google Scholar
Barber, H. A., Otten, L. J., Kousta, S. T., & Vigliocco, G. (2013). Concreteness in word processing: ERP and behavioral effects in a lexical decision task. Brain and Language, 125, 47–53. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2013.01.005Google Scholar
Bassetti, B., & Nicoladis, E. (2016). Research on grammatical gender and thought in early and emergent bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20, 3–16. doi: 10.1177/1367006915576824Google Scholar
Bernstein, J. B. (2015). Gender absence in Walloon. Paper presented at the International workshop on gender and number in Romance: Linguistic theory, acquisition and methodology, Germany.Google Scholar
Bertinetto, P. M., Burani, C., Laudanna, A., Marconi, L., Ratti, D., Rolando, C., & Thornton, A. M. (2005). CoLFIS (Corpus e lessico di frequenza dell'Italiano scritto). Retrieved from http://www.istc.cnr.it/material/database.Google Scholar
Bordag, D., & Pechmann, T. (2007). Factors influencing L2 gender processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 299–314. doi:10.1017/S1366728907003082Google Scholar
Bordag, D., & Pechmann, T. (2008). Grammatical gender in speech production: Evidence from Czech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 37, 69–85; doi: 10.1007/s10936-007-9060-0Google Scholar
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In Gentnter, D. & Goldin-Meadow S., S. (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 61–79). Boston: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Boutonnet, B., Athanasopoulos, P., & Thierry, G. (2012). Unconscious effects of grammatical gender during object categorization. Brain Research, 1479, 72–79. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2012.08.044Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46, 904–911. doi: 10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5Google Scholar
Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 14, 177–208. doi: 10.1080/026432997381664Google Scholar
Caramazza, A., & Miozzo, M. (1997). The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: Evidence from the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Cognition, 64, 309–343. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(97)00031-0Google Scholar
Chini, M. (1995). Genere grammaticale e acquisizione. Aspetti della morfologia nominale in italiano L2. Milano: FrancoAngeli.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (2011). Number of Genders. In Dryer, M. & Haspelmath, M. (Eds.), The World atlas of language structures online. Munich, Germany: Max Planck Digital Library.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Kovacic, D., Franck, J., & Caramazza, A. (2003). On the autonomy of the grammatical gender systems of the two languages of a bilingual. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 181–200. doi: 10.1017/S1366728903001123Google Scholar
Cubelli, R., Lotto, L., Paolieri, D., Girelli, M., & Job, R. (2005). Grammatical gender is selected in bare noun production: Evidence from the picture-word interference paradigm. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 42–59; doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2005.02.007Google Scholar
Cubelli, R., & Paolieri, D. (2008). The processing of grammatical gender as abstract lexical feature. In Arcuri, L., Boscolo, P., & Peressotti, F. (Eds.), Language and cognition. A long story. Festschrift in honour of Ino Flores D'Arcais (pp. 73–86). Padova: Cleup.Google Scholar
Cubelli, R., Paolieri, D., Lotto, L., & Job, R. (2011). The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 449–460. doi: 10.1037/a0021965Google Scholar
de Groot, A. M. (1989). Representational aspects of word imageability and word frequency as assessed through word association. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 824–845. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.15.5.824Google Scholar
de Groot, A., Dannenburg, L., & Van Hell, J. G. (1994). Forward and backward word translation by bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 600–629. doi: 10.1006/jmla.1994.1029Google Scholar
Friederici, A. D., & Jacobsen, T. (1999). Processing grammatical gender during language comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 467–484. doi: 10.1023/A:1023264209610Google Scholar
Ganushchak, L. Y., Verdonschot, R. G., & Schiller, N. O. (2011). When leaf becomes neuter: event-related potential evidence for grammatical gender transfer in bilingualism. Neuroreport, 22, 106–110. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e3283427359Google Scholar
Guo, T., & Peng, D. (2006). Event-related potential evidence for parallel activation of two languages in bilingual speech production. NeuroReport, 17, 1757–1760. doi: 10.1097/01.wnr.0000246327.89308.a5Google Scholar
Harris, J. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178707Google Scholar
Hoshino, N., & Kroll, J. F. (2008). Cognate effects in picture naming: Does cross-language activation survive a change of script? Cognition, 106, 501–511. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.02.001Google Scholar
Kaushanskaya, M., & Rechtzigel, K. (2012). Concreteness effects in bilingual and monolingual word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 935–941. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0271-5Google Scholar
Klassen, R. (2016). The representation of asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon. Probus, 28, 9–28. doi 10.1515/probus-2016-0002Google Scholar
Koch, S. C., Zimmermann, F., & Garcia-Retamero, R. (2007). El sol-die Sonne. Psychologische Rundschau, 58, 171–182. doi: 10.1026/0033-3042.58.3.171Google Scholar
Konishi, T. (1993). The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 519–534. doi: 10.1007/BF01068252Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Language and Memory, 33, 149–174. doi:10.1006/jmla.1994.1008.Google Scholar
Lemhöfer, K., Spalek, K., & Schriefers, H. (2008). Cross-language effects of grammatical gender in bilingual word recognition and production. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 312–330. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2008.06.005Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–38. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X99001776Google Scholar
Love, J., Selker, R., Verhagen, J., Marsman, M., Gronau, Q. F., Jamil, T., . . . & Wagenmakers, E. J. (2015). JASP (Version 0.6) [Computer software].Google Scholar
Lyashevsky, O. N., & Sharov, S. A. (2009). Frequency word list of Russian vocabulary based on the national corpus of the Russian language: Oral speech. Retrieved from http://dict.ruslang.ru/freq.phpGoogle Scholar
Martinez, I. M., & Shatz, M. (1996). Linguistic influences on categorization in preschool children: A crosslinguistic study. Journal of Child Language, 23, 529–545. doi: 10.1017/S030500090000893XGoogle Scholar
Mickan, A., Schiefke, M., & Stefanowitsch, A. (2014). Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al., 2003. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2, 39–50. doi: 10.1515/gcla-2014-0004Google Scholar
Mirkovic, J., MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2005). Where does gender come from? Evidence from a complex inflectional system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 139–167. doi: 10.1080/01690960444000205Google Scholar
Morales, L., Paolieri, D., Dussias, P. E., Kroff, J. R. V., Gerfen, C., & Bajo, M. T. (2016). The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19, 294–310. doi: 10.1017/S1366728915000176Google Scholar
Paolieri, D., Cubelli, R., Macizo, P., Bajo, T., Lotto, L., & Job, R. (2010). Grammatical gender processing in Italian and Spanish bilinguals. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1631–1645. doi: 10.1080/17470210903511210Google Scholar
Paolieri, D., Lotto, L., Leoncini, D., Cubelli, R., & Job, R. (2011). Differential effects of grammatical gender and gender inflection in bare noun production. British Journal of Psychology, 102, 19–36. doi: 10.1348/000712610X496536Google Scholar
Picallo, M.C. (2008). Gender and number in Romance. Lingue e Linguaggio, 7, 47–66.Google Scholar
Plaut, D. C., & Shallice, T. (1993). Deep dyslexia: A case study of connectionist neuropsychology. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 10, 377–500. doi: 10.1080/02643299308253469Google Scholar
Ritter, E. (1993). Where's gender? Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 795–803.Google Scholar
Rouder, J. N., Morey, R. D., Speckman, P. L., & Province, J. M. (2012). Default Bayes factors for ANOVA designs. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 56, 356–374. doi: 10.1016/j.jmp.2012.08.001Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., Stowe, L. A., & De Haan, G. J. (2006). Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research, 22, 1–29.Google Scholar
Salamoura, A., & Williams, J. N. (2007). The representation of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon: Evidence from Greek and German. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 257–275. doi: 10.1017/S1366728907003069Google Scholar
Sebastián, N., Martí, M. A., Carreiras, M. F., & Cuetos, F. (2000). LEXESP, Léxico informatizado del español [Computerized lexicon of Spanish]. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universitat de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Sera, M. D., Berge, C. A., & del Castillo Pintado, J. (1994). Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers. Cognitive Development, 9, 261–292. doi: 10.1016/0885-2014(94)90007-8Google Scholar
Van Hell, J. G., & de Groot, A. M. (1998). Conceptual representation in bilingual memory: Effects of concreteness and cognate status in word association. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 193–211. doi: 10.1017/S1366728998000352Google Scholar
Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D., Paganelli, F., & Dworzynski, K. (2005). Gender grammatical effects on cognition: Implications for language learning and language use. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 501–520. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.134.4.501Google Scholar