Transfer of Spanish grammatical gender to Englishevidence from immersed and non-immersed bilinguals

  1. Luis Morales Márquez
  2. Daniela Paolieri
  3. Roberto Cubelli
  4. María Teresa Bajo Molina
Revista:
Bilingualism: Language and cognition

ISSN: 1366-7289

Año de publicación: 2014

Volumen: 17

Número: 4

Páginas: 700-708

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1017/S1366728914000017 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Otras publicaciones en: Bilingualism: Language and cognition

Resumen

In this study we explored whether native Spanish speakers' knowledge of grammatical gender in their native language (L1) affects speech production in a second language (L2) which lacks this feature (English). We selected Spanish-English bilinguals for testing who were immersed in either an L1 or an L2 context. Using a picture-word task, participants had to name pictures in their L2 while ignoring distractor words that could be either gender-congruent or gender-incongruent according to the Spanish translation. Results revealed that non-immersed participants were slower naming the pictures in the congruent condition, suggesting that bilingual people are influenced by knowledge about gender in their native language, even when producing utterances in a language in which this information does not apply. However, no such influence was observed for immersed bilinguals, suggesting that immersion environment attenuates access to the native language. We interpret our results as evidence of transfer effects between languages with different lexical systems, which seem to depend on language immersion.