Paolieri, D. 1 , Morales, L. 1 , Dussias, P. 2 , Cubelli, R. 3 & Bajo, M. T. 1
1 University of Granada, Spain
2 Pennsylvania State University, USA
3 University of Trento, Italy
Recently the importance of grammatical gender in monolingual (Cubelli et al., 2005) and bilingual (Paolieri et al., 2010) production has been observed. In this study we explored whether the grammatical gender of the native language affects the production of words in a second language where the grammatical gender system is absent. Twenty-four Spanish-English bilinguals were instructed to name pictures in English during a picture-word interference task, producing the bare noun. Words distractors were presented in Spanish and half of the
nouns were gender congruent with the Spanish translation of the target while the other half were gender incongruent. The results showed slower English naming times in the L1 gender-congruent pairs relative to the L1 gender-incongruent pairs. This interference effect confirms that grammatical gender selection is crucial in languages with a complex morphological structure, like Spanish. Moreover, it suggests that in L2 naming task the grammatical gender of L1 is always active and can affect lexical selection also in a language, like English, where the grammatical gender is absent.