Gender processing in simultaneous and successive bilingual children: Cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns, irrespective of whether nouns belong to the same (gender-congruent) or different gender class in German and Russian. In visual-world eye tracking, we tested whether children use gender marking on German articles or adjectives to anticipate upcoming nouns. Like monolingual children, simultaneous bilingual children made predictive use of gender irrespective of gender congruency. In contrast, the successive bilingual children showed predictive gender processing only for lexically congruent nouns. We argue that the asynchronous acquisition of the L2 in successive bilinguals implicates that L2 gender is first accessed through the L1 lexicon. In contrast, syntactic differences between Russian and German gender do not affect early bilingual processing.