Grammatical gender processing in Italian and Spanish bilinguals.

We explored whether the grammatical gender of the native language (L1) affects the production of words in a second language (L2). Evidence from previous studies is contrasting. In the present investigation, Italian-Spanish bilinguals were instructed to name pictures in L2 (Experiments 1 and 2) or to translate words from L1 to L2 (Experiment 3), producing either the bare noun or the noun phrase (article + noun). Half of the nouns had the same gender in the two languages, while the other half had a different gender. In all experiments, responses were faster in the gender-congruent than in the gender-incongruent condition, irrespective of task (L2 picture naming or forward word translation) and syntactic type (bare noun and noun phrase). We propose that in the bilingual system, parallel to the semantic route, a direct lexical, nonsemantic route connects the languages and that the native language interacts at the level of grammatical gender with the lexical representations of the response language.