When Skunks are Similar to Giraffes and when they are not: Grammatical Gender Effects on Bilingual Cognition

We investigate how second language learning affects ‘think-ing for speaking ’ in the first and second language by examin-ing the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English). In an error-induction experi-ment we first establish a baseline, showing that gender affects the semantic substitution errors made by monolingual Italian speakers compared to monolingual English speakers. We then show that Italian—English bilinguals behave like monolin-gual English speakers when the task is in English, and like monolingual Italian speakers when the task is in Italian, hence exhibiting appropriate ‘thinking for speaking ’ for each lan-guage. These results have implications for linguistic relativ-ity/determinism and models of bilingual semantic memory and processing