Presentation
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Do grammatical gender cues facilitate processing?: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual speakers
Poster E43 in Poster Session E, Saturday, October 8, 3:15 - 5:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Gabrielle Manning1, Laura Sabourin1; 1University of Ottawa
Grammatical gender is often referred to as one of the most difficult grammatical categories to master, making it an ideal tool to investigate how grammatical concepts are processed. Previous studies have focused on anticipatory processing of grammatical gender cues in native speakers and have found a facilitation effect to upcoming nouns (e.g., Dussias et al., 2013; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010). However, these studies primarily focus on languages consisting of a highly transparent gender system (e.g., Spanish; Beatty-Martínez, et al., 2020) and findings are typically collapsed across grammatical genders, as opposed to disentangling them. The current study tested, 61 functional monolingual French speakers and 27 simultaneous French-English bilinguals from Ontario and Québec, Canada via an online study. At the time of testing, participants resided in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, a largely bilingual community. Participants completed a lexical decision task using a masked priming paradigm to examine how a gender-marked determiner (e.g., la) facilitates access to its corresponding noun (e.g., maison). Trials consisted of congruent (e.g., la maison) and incongruent (e.g., le maison*) determiner-noun pairs. Results show that simultaneous bilinguals are slower to respond than monolinguals (p=.03*). This result is thought to be reflective of the presence of more than one lexicon in the bilingual speaker. Due to the potential integration and activation of both lexicons, simultaneous speakers take longer to access and process the relevant information. Further, neither language group demonstrated facilitative processing from grammatical gender cues for either the feminine or masculine congruent conditions (p>.05). Interestingly, the monolingual group was quicker to respond in the incongruent masculine condition (e.g., la bateau*) in relation to the congruent masculine condition (e.g,. le bateau) (p=.018*). Feminine gender cues on the determiner in French may be strong enough to use with any noun regardless of the noun gender. The same pattern is not present in the congruent masculine condition, potentially due to French's ‘default masculine’ notion, resulting in the masculine determiner being used flexibly. The remaining results do not coincide with previous literature on anticipatory processing, as no gender congruency effect is seen. These findings may be reflective of the bilingual language environment speakers currently reside in, resulting in more flexible use of gender cues and/or less importance placed on utilizing gender cues. Additionally, the implemented behavioural methodology may not accurately tap into the potential use of gender cues. Therefore, more sensitive measures, (e.g., Event-Related Potentials), are likely to provide further insight into the implicit processing involved in grammatical gender cuing in real-time.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Reading