The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals

It has been known for some time that the recognition of a noun is affected by the gender marking, such as masculine or feminine, that is carried by a preceding word. In this study, we used auditory naming to examine how early and late English-French bilinguals react to gender marking when processing French. The early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effe cts, but the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking, wh ether congruent or incongruent. The results are discussed in terms of curre nt accounts of gender processing as well as age of acquisition and regular use of the gender-marking language.