Grammatical gender systems in the bilingual mental lexicon

Abstract This study explores gender assignment strategies in Russian-Hebrew code-mixed adjective-noun phrases. Russian features a three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter), while Hebrew uses a two-gender system (masculine, feminine). Despite these differences, both languages share transparent gender assignment cues: nouns ending in -a are typically feminine, while those ending in consonants are generally masculine. Both languages also feature opaque nouns. Eighty Russian-Hebrew speakers participated, divided into heritage language (HL) speakers (age of bilingualism onset [AoB]: 0–6 years, dominant in Hebrew) and immigrant (IMM) speakers (AoB: 9+ years, dominant in Russian). Participants rated the acceptability of code-mixed sentences featuring Russian nouns within Hebrew matrix sentences. Results showed a preference for strategies combining shape-based and insertion approaches with transparent nouns, reflecting overlapping linguistic cues in both languages. The same strategies were preferred for opaque congruent nouns, where no gender conflict existed. For opaque gender-incongruent nouns, strategy use was shaped by the degree of overlap between the languages’ gender systems. Although differences between HL and IMM speakers were expected, no group variation in strategy use was found. These findings advance our understanding of gender assignment in code-switching contexts and shed light on how bilinguals represent and process gender when two linguistic gender systems are involved.