title: The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition.
abstract: We investigate the 'gender-congruency' effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / 'find the scarf') and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects' name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center; Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Morales
authors.affiliation: Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center; Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Paolieri
authors.affiliation: Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; Penn State University, USA.
authors.forename: Paola E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Dussias
authors.affiliation: Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies; University of Florida, USA.
authors.forename: Jorge R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Valdés Kroff
authors.affiliation: Department of World Languages & Cultures; American University, USA.
authors.forename: Chip
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gerfen
authors.affiliation: Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center; Department of Experimental Psychology; University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: María Teresa
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Bajo
keywords: bilingual lexical access; grammatical gender; spoken-language comprehension; visual world paradigm