Grammatical gender processing in multilinguals: evidence from visual word recognition in L3 Spanish

• Długosz, Kamil ^[1]
  1. [1] Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

     Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

     Poznań, Polonia

     
• Localización: International journal of multilingualism, ISSN 1479-0718, Vol. 23, Nº. 3, 2026, págs. 1303-1318
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study investigates grammatical gender processing in multilingual visual word recognition, focusing on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect, which has only been studied in bilingual contexts. The study explores which language – L1 or L2 – has a stronger influence on gender processing in L3, and whether there is a cumulative effect of L1 and L2 on L3. Thirty-one adult L1 Polish learners of L3 Spanish (elementary proficiency) and L2 German (upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency) completed a primed lexical decision task and a go/no-go gender decision task in their L3 Spanish. The results reveal a consistent gender congruency effect with L1 but not with L2, even after controlling for participants’ knowledge of gender in L2. These results suggest that when L3 is not typologically related to L1 or L2, L1 has a dominant influence on gender processing in L3. The findings are interpreted in terms of the stability of gender representations in L1 versus L2, and are further discussed in relation to the parasitic model of vocabulary acquisition.