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Gender matters: From L1 grammar to L2 semantics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2016

SVETLANA V. COOK
SVETLANA V. COOK*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
Address for Correspondence: Svetlana V. Cook, University of Maryland, National Foreign Language Center, 5245 Greenbelt Rd, Severn Building 810, College Park, MD 20742, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The study investigates the effects of grammatical gender on bilingual processing. Native speakers of Russian (a gendered language) learning English and monolingual English controls performed a self-paced reading task in English (a non-gendered language). As predicted, bilingual speakers showed delayed latencies to gendered pronouns (he or she) that were incongruent with the noun's grammatical gender in Russian, indicating that first language (L1) grammatical gender assignment can be interpreted as biological gender in nonnative (L2) processing. The L1 gender bias was only found in sentences containing animate, but not inanimate, nouns. These results speak against the syntactic mechanism being solely responsible for gender biases, but rather support a semantic transfer account due to coactivation of linguistic and conceptual features as proposed in the sex and gender hypothesis (SAGH, Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli & Dworzynski, 2005). Overall, the study provides clear evidence for the L1 grammatical gender bias in bilingual processing, albeit constrained by animacy.

Keywords

non-selectivitygrammatical genderlinguistic relativityRussianself-paced reading
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 13 - 31
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The author is deeply indebted to Nan Jiang, Kira Gor, and Robert DeKeyser for guidance at various stages of the study, Jonathan Cook for inspiration for the study, Carrie Bonilla for her comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, and to three anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and comments. The remaining mistakes are my own. The study was supported in part by the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland.

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