Acquisition of a Transparent Gender System: A Comparison of Italian and Croatian

Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a heritage language: A speed accuracy tradeoff

“…We expect HSs’ overall performance to benefit from higher proficiency in the HL (i.e., Bianchi, 2013 ; Kupisch et al, 2013 ) and more HL use (i.e., Bianchi, 2013 ). Regarding AoO, there are two possible scenarios: in line with Montrul (2008) and Keating (2022) , sequential HSs could be more accurate and show sensitivity to markedness earlier (faster RTs) than simultaneous HSs; or similar to Bianchi (2013) , we could find no difference between the two groups of HSs due to the fact that gender acquisition in Italian is not problematic, given the high degree of transparency of the Italian gender system ( Kupisch et al, 2002 ; Velnić, 2020 ), and thus robust to AoO of bilingualism effects.…”

“…However, even advanced HSs often are different compared to monolinguals with respect to grammatical gender when tested on non-canonical nouns (i.e., Bianchi, 2013;Montrul et al, 2013). Previous studies measuring HSs' relative amount (and quality) of exposure and use of their HL have shown that variation in HL exposure has consequences for HL development in children (i.e., Gagarina and Klassert, 2018;Torregrossa et al, 2021) and maintenance in adults (i.e., Lloyd-Smith et al, 2019, 2020. Some studies on gender have shown that HL exposure and/or use has an effect on HSs' performance (i.e., Bianchi, 2013);however, others (i.e., Fuchs, 2021) found no evidence.…”

Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task

“…Our results also coincide with those obtained with bilingual populations. Bilinguals have been shown to have an integrated gender system with both languages sharing the same gender nodes (Sá-Leite et al, 2019, 2020. In many studies, the production of nouns of one gender in the second language is facilitated when their translations in the first language activate the same gender node but hampered when they activate a different gender node (cross-linguistic GCE; Paolieri et al, 2010bPaolieri et al, , 2019Morales et al, 2011;Manolescu and Jarema, 2015;Klassen, 2016)-competition does not occur by similarity.…”

“…To do that two PWI experiments with EP bare nouns were conducted. On the one hand, these experiments would allow us to test the tenets of the GAP hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al, 2019 ) according to which the production of bare nouns in a gender transparent language (Velnić, 2020 ) should entail the selection of gender. On the other hand, they would also allow us to test the impact of animacy on the predicted gender competitive effects, following the tenets of the semantic prioritization that occurs in the lexical access of animate nouns (Branigan et al, 2008 ) and those of the Animate Monitoring hypothesis (New et al, 2007 ).…”

“…Importantly, the main postulate of this model states that there are differences in the basal level of activation of the connections between nouns and gender nodes as well as in the gender nodes themselves depending on the general level of gender transparency of the languages. More specifically, many Germanic languages have been identified as opaque for gender, but most Romance languages fall on the transparent side, and hence gender is extremely visible in the form of the words, especially with regard to nouns themselves (Velnić, 2020). In languages such as German and Dutch, the gender system has been described as highly complex in terms of gendered morphophonology, in the sense that even though gender can be predicted for many nouns, the number of regularities is so high and the exceptions are so many that it is not clear to what extent these are cognitively useful (in fact, relative and even absolute complexity in the gender assignment system has been linked to a slower speed of gender acquisition; Audring, 2017Audring, , 2019.…”