When Skunks are Similar to Giraffes and when they are not: Grammatical Gender Effects on Bilingual Cognition

We investigate how second language learning affects ‘thinking for speaking’ in the first and second language by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English). In an error-induction experiment we first establish a baseline, showing that gender affects the semantic substitution errors made by monolingual Italian speakers compared to monolingual English speakers. We then show that Italian—English bilinguals behave like monolingual English speakers when the task is in English, and like monolingual Italian speakers when the task is in Italian, hence exhibiting appropriate ‘thinking for speaking’ for each language. These results have implications for linguistic relativity/determinism and models of bilingual semantic memory and processing.