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On the autonomy of the grammatical gender systems of the two languages of a bilingual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2004

ALBERT COSTA ,
DAMIR KOVACIC ,
JULIE FRANCK  and
ALFONSO CARAMAZZA
ALBERT COSTA
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona
DAMIR KOVACIC
Affiliation:
Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA)
JULIE FRANCK
Affiliation:
Université de Genève
ALFONSO CARAMAZZA
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

In five experiments highly-proficient bilinguals were asked to name two sets of pictures in their L2: a) pictures whose names in the L2 and their corresponding L1 translations have the same grammatical gender value, and b) pictures whose names in the L2 and their corresponding L1 translations have different gender values. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3 Croatian-Italian speakers were asked to name the pictures in Italian by means of NPs in various experimental contexts. In Experiment 4A, Spanish-Catalan and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name the pictures in Spanish, and in Experiment 4B, Italian-French bilinguals did so in French. The results of these experiments revealed no differences between same- and different-gender pictures. Furthermore, the performance of Italian, Spanish, and French monolingual speakers parallels that of bilingual speakers. However, a robust frequency effect was observed across experiments. This pattern of results supports the notion that the gender value of the words in the non-response language does not affect processing in the response language, and suggests that the two gender systems of a bilingual are functionally autonomous.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , December 2003 , pp. 181 - 200
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2003

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Footnotes

This research was supported by NIH grant DC 04542, a grant from the Spanish Government (BSO2001-3492-C04-01), a grant from the Swiss FNS (1114-068250.02), and also by the McDonnell grant ‘Bridging Mind Brain & Behavior’. Albert Costa was supported by a Post-doctoral Fellowship from SISSA and by the research program ‘Ramon y Cajal’ from the Spanish Government. Damir Kovacic was supported by a Pre-doctoral fellowship from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA). The authors are grateful to Luca Bonati, Marcela Peña, Jacques Mehler and Xavier Alario for their helpful comments on this paper. We also thank Minkha Hoang, Simone Cotti and Olga Gomez for their help in the preparation of the experiments. Requests for reprints may be addressed to Albert Costa.