Language balance rather than age of acquisition: a study on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect in Portuguese–German bilinguals
| Bilingualism: Language and Cognition | 2023 | DOI
Artigo de Jornal
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/UE9XH
The cross-linguistic gender congruency effect (GCE; a facilitation on gender retrieval for translations of the same gender) is a robust phenomenon analysed almost exclusively with late bilinguals. However, it is important to ascertain whether it is modulated by age of acquisition (AoA) and language proficiency. We asked 64 early and late bilinguals of European Portuguese and German to do a forward and backward translation task. A measure of language balance was calculated through the DIALANG test. Analyses included this factor along with the gender congruency between translations, the target language, and the AoA of both languages, among others. Results showed a GCE for European Portuguese that was independent of the AoA and greater the higher the language imbalance. We propose that changes in proficiency in any of the languages create situations of dependency between them which allow cross-linguistic gender interaction to occur and effects to emerge depending on gender transparency.
This work was funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the Portuguese State Budget (UIDP/01662/2020) and the grant UIDB/00305/2020, as well as by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, through the Training program for Academic Staff (Ayudas para la Formación del Profesorado Universitario [FPU16/06983]), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [research project PID2019-110583GB-I00]