The representation of grammatical gender in the bilingual mental lexicon: the case of cognate and noncognate nouns

The present paper investigates the shared or independent nature of grammatical gender representations in the bilingual mental lexicon and the role word form similarity (as in the case of cognates) plays in these representations. In a translation task from Greek (L1) to German (L2), L1-L2 nouns with the same gender (gender-congruent) were translated faster than L1-L2 nouns with a different gender (gender-incongruent) when the L2 target utterance required computation of gender agreement (adjective + noun). This tendency held for both cognates and noncognates. Unlike noncognates, however, gender-incongruent cognates yielded more errors than gender-congruent cognates. These results are interpreted as evidence for an L1-L2 shared gender system with L2 cognates relying more heavily on the L1 gender value.