Grammatical gender is a linguistic feature present in many of the world’s languages that divides nouns into different word classes. As there is typically no clear link between the meaning of the noun and its grammatical gender (e.g. ‘car’, which is feminine in French, ‘la voiture’; masculine in Spanish, ‘el coche’; and neuter in German, ‘das Auto’), the feature poses difficulties to bilinguals at all levels of proficiency. For this reason, grammatical gender comprises an important area of research in order to better understand how language information is represented in the bilingual mental lexicon and how bilinguals use this information in their languages. A better understanding of language in bilinguals is undoubtedly relevant in society given the prevalence of bi- and multilingualism in Europe and around the world. Such knowledge contributes not only to a variety of areas of scientific research, but also provides the basis on which language teachers build curricula and informs language policy at multiple levels of government.
The overall objectives of GenBiLex were to provide a broader and more complete perspective on grammatical gender in bilinguals by including speakers with diverse bilingual profiles and incorporating language acquisition, psycholinguistic and theoretical linguistic perspectives. The research carried out in GenBiLex showed that when working in a non-native language, bilinguals are almost always affected by the gender of the noun in their native language, even if the languages are very different (e.g. Latvian and Spanish). When a word has the same gender in both languages (e.g. ‘shoe’, masculine in both German, ‘der Schuh’, and Spanish, ‘el zapato’), bilinguals are faster to understand the word while also being less prone to making mistakes (e.g. ‘die Schuh’ instead of ‘der Schuh’). However, this does not hold when the languages have fundamentally different ways of classifying the nouns, such as Dutch (common, ‘de schoen’; and neuter, ‘het huis’) and Spanish (masculine, ‘el zapato’; and feminine, ‘la casa’). Even though both Dutch and Spanish divide nouns into two grammatical genders, the labels for and the underlying system in these genders is different enough that the gender from the native language does not affect the non-native language in the same way.
