Author, as appears in the article.: Casado A; Ferré P; Paolieri D
Department: Psicologia
URV's Author/s: Ferré Romeu, Maria Pilar
Keywords: N400 Lexical access Gender congruency Erps Bilinguals
Abstract: In the present study we explore whether gender congruency between languages modulates bilinguals’ access to their second language words presented in isolation. We predicted that accessing L2 words that have a different gender across languages (gender-incongruent) would be more costly and require more effort than accessing same-gender words (gender-congruent) due to language co-activation, even when no access to L1 was required to perform the task. Additionally, we intended to shed some light into the mechanism underlying the gender congruency effect. To these aims, we compared the performance of Spanish native speakers with that of Italian-Spanish bilinguals (Italian native speakers) during a lexical decision task. The participants saw Spanish words that were gender-congruent and gender-incongruent between languages while event related potentials were recorded. Moreover, as an additional manipulation, we selected nouns that in both languages could be ambiguous or unambiguous. With the aim to examine whether the underlying mechanism is activation of multiple information during word processing, we focused on the N400 component, related with the effort to integrate lexical-semantic information: higher N400 amplitudes indicate greater effort. According to our prediction, Italian-Spanish bilinguals produced more errors and evoked larger N400 amplitudes when accessing gender-incongruent than gender-congruent words, while no differences appeared for Spanish native speakers between conditions. These results indicate that gender-incongruent words are harder to integrate compared with gender-congruent words, and that bilinguals automatically activate the grammatical gender of both languages during L2 language comprehension. Nevertheless, the results do not seem to support the assumption of a similar mechanism responsible for the gender congruency and the ambiguity effects. In short, the gender-congruency effect seems to originate due to activation of multiple information at the lexical level which generates difficulties to integrate at the semantic level during word access.
Thematic Areas: Psychology, experimental Psychology Psicología Neurosciences Linguistics and language Linguistics Letras / linguística Language and linguistics Language & linguistics Filologia, lingüística i sociolingüística Experimental and cognitive psychology Engenharias iv Educação física Cognitive neuroscience Ciencias sociales Ciencias humanas Arts and humanities (miscellaneous) Applied linguistics
licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Author's mail: mariadelpilar.ferre@urv.cat
Author identifier: 0000-0002-3192-0040
Record's date: 2023-08-05
Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Link to the original source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0911604423000337
Papper original source: Journal Of Neurolinguistics. 68
APA: Casado A; Ferré P; Paolieri D (2023). Gender congruency between languages influence second-language comprehension: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Journal Of Neurolinguistics, 68(), -. DOI: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2023.101156
Licence document URL: http://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
Article's DOI: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2023.101156
Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Journal publication year: 2023
Publication Type: Journal Publications
Repositori URV