Bidirectional interactions between L1 and L2 gender systems

Abstract Research on grammatical gender in bilinguals has mostly examined L1 effects on L2, with less focus on reverse influence or individual differences. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested bidirectional interactions between Polish (L1) and German (L2) gender in 57 late unbalanced Polish–German bilinguals. Participants performed spoken word recognition in both languages with picture pairs whose nouns shared gender in the target language, with targets either congruent or incongruent with the other language’s gender. We also measured gender-representation stability, operationalised as mean accuracy and certainty in gender assignment. Mixed-effects analyses revealed significant gender congruency effects in both languages, which were stronger among participants with lower mean assignment accuracy. In L2 German, effects were additionally modulated by certainty. Gender congruency effects in L1 were overall weaker than in L2. These findings suggest integrated cross-language gender representations, modulated by representational stability, and are discussed within parasitic accounts of the bilingual lexicon.