Do grammatical-gender distinctions learned in the second language influence native-language lexical processing?

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: How does learning a second language influence native language processing? The present study examined whether knowledge of Spanish - a language that marks grammatical gender - influences lexical processing in English - a language that does not mark grammatical gender. Design/Methodology/Approach: Three groups of adult English native speakers were tested: monolinguals; emergent bilinguals with high exposure to Spanish; and emergent bilinguals with low exposure to Spanish. Participants engaged in an associative learning task in English where they learned to associate names of inanimate objects with proper names. For half of the pairs, the grammatical gender of the noun's Spanish translation matched the gender of the proper name (e.g. corn-Patrick). For half of the pairs, the grammatical gender of the noun's Spanish translation mismatched the gender of the proper noun (e.g. beach-William). Data and Analysis: Fifty-six participants were tested - 21 monolingual speakers of English, 18 emergent bilinguals with high exposure to Spanish, and 17 emergent bilinguals with low exposure to Spanish. Data were analyzed using mixed analyses of variance. Findings/Conclusions: High-Spanish-exposure bilinguals (but not monolinguals or low-Spanish-exposure bilinguals) were less accurate at retrieving proper names for gender-incongruent than for gender-congruent pairs. Originality: The methodological approach used in this paper is especially well-suited to testing activation of grammatical gender in languages like English, which do not grammaticize gender. Significance/Implications: The findings of this study indicate that second-language morphosyntactic information is activated during native-language lexical processing, even when the second language is acquired later in life. This is particularly significant, considering well-known limitations in explicit knowledge of grammatical gender distinctions in the late-acquired second language.