Interlingual and Intralingual Interference during Gender Production

The purpose of this article is to explore the psycholinguistic aspects of interlingual and intralingual interference during second language grammatical gender production. Two experiments were constructed to explore whether the difficulties in acquisition and correct production of grammatical gender in a second language are influenced by competition for selection between the gender node of a second language noun and the gender node of its first language translation equivalent. The languages tested were Czech and German, which have the same number and type of grammatical gender. The results of the experiments confirmed the initial hypothesis concerning the gender competition. Furthermore, the analysis of the gender errors subjects made in both experiments yielded evidence that phonological form, especially word termination, also has an effect on gender production in the second language. The intralingual interference manifested itself especially in gender overgeneralization or misselection in cases where second language nouns had an atypical or ambiguous termination.