Effects of morphosyntactic gender features in 6 bilingual language processing ,

13 A central issue in bilingual research concerns the extent to which linguistic representations in the two 14 languages are processed independently of each other. This paper reports the results of an empirical study 15 and a model stimulation, which provide evidence for the interactive view, which holds that processing 16 is not independent. Specifically, a reading experiment examined whether morpho-syntactic features 17 associated with lexical representations in a bilinguals’ native language, in this case the masculine gender 18 feature associated with the er ending of agentive nouns in German, are automatically activated by the 19 processing of morphologically related representations in their second language, in this case English 20 agentive nouns that end in er. Experimental findings suggest that the German–English bilinguals have 21 a bias to interpret the referents of such nouns as male relative to English monolinguals. Subsequent 22 computational simulation studies with an interactive activation network confirmed that this effect is 23 due to the influence of the morphosyntactic er representation in the bilingual models that is absent in 24 the monolingual models. The result provide evidence for an interactive view of bilingual memory and 25 processing for language mearners of age 8 and above. 26 © 2004 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved. 27