Interference of Lexico-Syntactic Gender in Bilingual Spoken-Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study with Non-Cognate Nouns

Several eye-movement studies have confirmed that, even in monolingual situations, bilinguals activate lexical candidates from all languages when recognizing spoken words: When asked to pick up an object (e.g. a marker), late bilinguals often briefly look at crosslinguistic competitors whose name is phonemically similar to the target (e.g. a stamp, /marka / in Russian).[1] L1 phonemic categories are also known to influence lexical access in L2.[2] Recent evidence further suggests that L1 gender interferes with L2 listening for cognate nouns: When instructed in German to click on a cassette (die[fem] Kassette), French-speaking participants excluded a canon from consideration, despite onset similarity with Kassette in both languages, because it differs in gender in French although it does not in German.[3] However, L2 gender could be stored differently for non-cognates. In general, bilinguals process cognates faster and the effects are stronger. Therefore, it is conceivable that L1 gender interference in L2 might be stronger for, or even specific to, cognates. If so, L1 gender’s influence might be relatively marginal, since most words are non-cognates. The present eye-tracking experiment was run entirely in French with German-Frenc