Effects of morphosyntactic gender features in bilingual language processing

A central issue in bilingual research concerns the extent to which linguistic representations in the two languages are processed independently of each other. This paper reports the results of an empirical study and a model stimulation, which provide evidence for the interactive view, which holds that processing is not independent. Specifically, a reading experiment examined whether morpho-syntactic features associated with lexical representations in a bilinguals' native language, in this case the masculine gender feature associated with the er ending of agentive nouns in German, are automatically activated by the processing of morphologically related representations in their second language, in this case English agentive nouns that end in er. Experimental findings suggest that the German

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: COGSCI
• Authors: Matthias Scheutz, Kathleen M. Eberhard
• Keywords: Agentive Nouns, COGSCI 2004, English Agentive Nouns, Interactive View