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Bidirectional interactions between L1 and L2 gender systems

A visual world eye-tracking study with Polish–German bilinguals

ORCiD logo with link | Adam Mickiewicz UniversityPoznań
ORCiD logo with link | Adam Mickiewicz UniversityPoznań
ORCiD logo with link | Adam Mickiewicz UniversityPoznań
ORCiD logo with link | Adam Mickiewicz UniversityPoznań
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the authors.

Published online: 23 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.25087.dlu
Abstract
Research on grammatical gender in bilinguals has mostly examined L1 effects on L2, with less focus on reverse influence or individual differences. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested bidirectional interactions between Polish (L1) and German (L2) gender in 57 late unbalanced Polish–German bilinguals. Participants performed spoken word recognition in both languages with picture pairs whose nouns shared gender in the target language, with targets either congruent or incongruent with the other language’s gender. We also measured gender-representation stability, operationalised as mean accuracy and certainty in gender assignment. Mixed-effects analyses revealed significant gender congruency effects in both languages, which were stronger among participants with lower mean assignment accuracy. In L2 German, effects were additionally modulated by certainty. Gender congruency effects in L1 were overall weaker than in L2. These findings suggest integrated cross-language gender representations, modulated by representational stability, and are discussed within parasitic accounts of the bilingual lexicon.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Representation and processing of gender in bilinguals
    • 2.2Stability of gender representations and bilingual gender processing
    • 2.3Grammatical gender systems of German and Polish
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.4Apparatus
    • 3.5Procedure
    • 3.6Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Eye-tracking task in L2 German
      • 4.1.1Article window
      • 4.1.2Noun window
    • 4.2Eye-tracking task in L1 Polish
      • 4.2.1Noun window
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Competing interests
  • Disclosure of use of AI tools
  • Data availability statement
  • CRediT author statement
  • References
References (61)
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