GenBiLex · Multiple Perspectives on Grammatical Gender in the Bilingual Lexicon
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-08-01 → 2020-04-17
- EU contribution
- €208,400
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Multiple Perspectives on Grammatical Gender in the Bilingual Lexicon
Grammatical gender is a linguistic feature present in many of the world’s languages that divides nouns into different word classes. As there is typically no clear link between the meaning of the noun and its grammatical gender (e.g. ‘car’, which is feminine in French, ‘la voiture’; masculine in Spanish, ‘el coche’; and neuter in German, ‘das Auto’), the feature poses difficulties to bilinguals at all levels of proficiency. For this reason, grammatical gender comprises an important area of research in order to better understand how language information is represented in the bilingual mental lexicon and how bilinguals use this information in their languages. A better understanding of language in bilinguals is undoubtedly relevant in society given the prevalence of bi- and multilingualism in Europe and around the world. Such knowledge contributes not only to a variety of areas of scientific research, but also provides the basis on which language teachers build curricula and informs language policy at multiple levels of government. The overall objectives of GenBiLex were to provide a broader and more complete perspective on grammatical gender in bilinguals by including speakers with diverse bilingual profiles and incorporating language acquisition, psycholinguistic and theoretical linguistic perspectives. The research carried out in GenBiLex showed that when working in a non-native language, bilinguals are almost always affected by the gender of the noun in their native language, even if the languages are very different (e.g. Latvian and Spanish). When a word has the same gender in both languages (e.g. ‘shoe’, masculine in both German, ‘der Schuh’, and Spanish, ‘el zapato’), bilinguals are faster to understand the word while also being less prone to making mistakes (e.g. ‘die Schuh’ instead of ‘der Schuh’). However, this does not hold when the languages have fundamentally different ways of classifying the nouns, such as Dutch (common, ‘de schoen’; and neuter, ‘het huis’) and Spanish (masculine, ‘el zapato’; and feminine, ‘la casa’). Even though both Dutch and Spanish divide nouns into two grammatical genders, the labels for and the underlying system in these genders is different enough that the gender from the native language does not affect the non-native language in the same way.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Grammatical gender represents an important area of research given the difficulty gender assignment and agreement poses to bilinguals at all levels of proficiency. As such, the objective of GenBiLex is to develop a comprehensive proposal of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon that includes psycholinguistic, language acquisition and theoretical linguistic approaches. Little previous research has examined the consequences of differences between the L1 and L2 gender systems, either in terms of the number of gender values (e.g. 2 vs 3 values) or the values themselves (e.g. common/neuter vs masculine/feminine). GenBiLex addresses this crucial gap by examining bilinguals with different types of gender systems in order to offer insight into the representation of and interactions between the L1 and L2 gender features in the lexicon and how this is borne out in the use of gender in the L2. In this research 140 adult native speakers (L1) of Norwegian, German, Dutch and French learning Spanish (L2) perform an L2 gender decision task (indicate the gender value of L2 nouns) and an eye-tracking reading acceptability judgment task (rate sentences with code-switched Determiner Phrases, e.g. die mesa, ‘theGER tableSPA’). The stimuli are manipulated in terms of the gender congruency between the L1 and L2 nouns, allowing for the representation and use of gender in the L2 to be examined and bilinguals’ use of gender agreement in code-switching to be investigated with respect to theoretical syntactic proposals.GenBiLex complements previous work on grammatical gender by the Language Acquisition, Variation and Attrition group at the University of Tromsø, extending their research to include L2 acquisition and more language pairings. The outcome of this research will be a significantly deeper understanding of the representation and processing of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon that contributes to psycholinguistics, language acquisition and theoretical linguistics.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITETET I TROMSOE - NORGES ARKTISKE UNIVERSITET · TromsoCoordinatorNorway
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union