BISAGS Project

Bidirectional Interactions between Symmetric and Asymmetric Grammatical Gender Systems in Bilingual Language Comprehension and Production

 

Funding: National Science Centre, Poland (OPUS 25)
ID number: 2023/49/B/HS2/00173
Period: 2024-2027 (36 months)
Project Team: Kamil Długosz (PI), Mikołaj Sobkowiak, Anna Olszewska, Anna Skałba

Description
Research has shown that both languages of a bilingual are always active, and it is impossible to switch off one of them. The co-activation of languages has an important impact on how they are produced and comprehended. The aim of BISAGS is to investigate this phenomenon with respect to grammatical gender. In languages with grammatical gender, each noun is classified into one of several classes. For example, the Polish noun drzewo (‘tree’) is neuter and książka (‘book’) is feminine. Studies have found that bilinguals activate the grammatical gender information of their first language when using a second language. If the gender of a noun is the same in the first and second language, the processing of that noun is facilitated. Yet, what happens when languages differ in the number and type of gender classes? Can grammatical gender in a second language affect gender processing in the first language?

The aim of BISAGS is to explore bidirectional interactions between two grammatical gender systems during language production and comprehension by Polish native speakers learning German or Danish. Polish is similar to German (both languages distinguish three gender classes: masculine, feminine, and neuter) but differs from Danish (which distinguishes only two classes: common and neuter). BISAGS also focuses on the role of the following factors that can potentially modulate the interactions between grammatical gender systems: L2 proficiency level, linguistic context (bare noun, noun phrase, sentence), and cognate status.

BISAGS is using comprehension and production experiments, such as translation recognition and picture naming, as well as visual world eye-tracking. Participants are adult native speakers of Polish learning German or Danish as L2 at different proficiency levels in instructed settings.

BISAGS will contribute to the ongoing debate about language co-activation in bilinguals, thereby advancing our knowledge of bilingual processing. Based on the data from language pairs that have not been studied before, BISAGS will shed new light on the processing and architecture of the grammatical gender system in the bilingual mental lexicon.