Examining the facilitative use of grammatical gender cues in L1 and L2 Swedish

In the present study, 48 native speakers of Swedish and 46 Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish read sentence preambles with or without grammatical gender cues to an upcoming picture/noun, and named the picture in Swedish as fast as possible. The study investigated whether facilitation from the gender cues, in terms of faster naming latencies to the nouns, was modulated by markedness and the number of gender cues. In both groups, facilitation only emerged for nouns of the marked gender (neuters) and only after preambles with two gender cues, suggesting that both groups showed similar sensitivity to markedness and to the number of gender cues. This was the case, despite the learners’ first language (L1) Finnish lacking grammatical gender. These results appear more in line with proposals which assume that anticipatory mechanisms are similar and are modulated by similar factors in the L1 and the second language (L2).