When the end matters: influence of gender cues during agreement computation in bilinguals

Published online: 06 Feb 2017 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1283426 Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1283426 The present event-related potential (ERP) study was aimed at testing whether form-function mappings can differently affect sentence comprehension in early bilinguals with a range of linguistic profiles. Basque–Spanish and Spanish–Basque early bilinguals were presented with Spanish sentences with article-noun gender agreement violations. The gender of the target noun could be retrieved based on the word-form (i.e. transparent nouns) or only on a lexical representation (i.e. opaque nouns). While Basque-dominant bilinguals showed an impact of gender-to-ending consistency on agreement computation, Spanish-dominant bilinguals’ agreement processing was not affected by form-function mappings. A multiple regression analysis on early ERP responses from all participants showed that the more Spanish was produced on a daily basis, the easier the detection of gender violation for opaque nouns. The present results suggest that the strength of the lexical representation of gender is not fixed and can change depending on the linguistic habits of early bilinguals. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PSI 2014-54500-P, PSI2015-65694-P]; the Eusko Jaurlaritza [PI_2015_1_25]; the “Severo Ochoa” Programme for Centres/Units of Excellence in R&D [SEV-2015- 0490]; and the AThEME project [FP7-SSH-2013-1-GA613465], which has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 613465.