Interlingual and Intralingual Interference during Gender Production

Interlingual and Intralingual Interference during Gender Production 

in Czech and German 

Denisa Bordag 

University ofLeipzig & Charles University in Prague 

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore the psycholinguistic aspects of 

interlingual and intralingual interference during second language grammatical 

gender production. Two experiments were constructed to explore whether the 

difficulties in acquisition and correct production of grammatical gender in a second 

language are influenced by competition for selection between the gender node of a 

second language noun and the gender node of its first language translation 

equivalent. The languages tested were Czech and German, which have the same 

number and type of grammatical gender. The results of the experiments confirmed 

the initial hypothesis concerning the gender competition. Furthermore, the analysis 

of the gender errors subjects made in both experiments yielded evidence that 

phonological form, especially word termination, also has an effect on gender 

production in the second language. The intralingual interference manifested itself 

especially in gender overgeneralization or misselection in cases where second 

language nouns had an atypical or ambiguous termination. 

1. Introduction 

Interlingual and intralingual interference have been in the center of second 

language research for a very long time. The period when the influence of 

interlingual interference on SLA was overestimated (Weinerich 1953, Lado 

1957) was followed by a period which was dominated by the Creative 

Construction Hypothesis of Dulay & Burt (1974 and later), who claimed that 

most errors are developmental and that interlingual interference has a minimal 

effect on SLA. In the late seventies and eighties the situation developed towards 

a more balanced approach to the interfrence phenomena, admitting that both 

interlingual and intralingual interference play an important role in SLA, though 

the strength of their influence may differ depending on various factors, e.g. 

language proficiency. Interference, or, as often preferred, transfer is also no 

longer seen as a mechanical transference of first language features or structures 

Cahiers linguistiques d'Ottawa, June/juin 2004, Vol. 32: 1-23 

ISSN 0315-3167. ©2004, Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa

Denisa Bordag 

into the second language, but rather is generally viewed as a complex cognitive 

mechanism underlying SLA. 

The emphasis on the cognitive character of interference/transfer, has not, 

however, resulted in extensive psycholinguistic research of these phenomena so 

far. One of the possible reasons is that for a long time psycholinguistics has been 

concerned mainly with the processing and acquisition of the first language. 

In this paper I want to investigate the influence of interlingual and 

intralingual interference on second language acquisition and production. The 

subject of my research is grammatical gender. Though a very challenging topic 

(as numerous studies exploring grammatical gender production and 

representation in first language show, see below), it has hardly been addressed by 

psycholinguists so far. A probable explanation might be the fact that one of the 

two languages used in second language psycholinguistic research is usually 

English, a language without grammatical gender and thus intrinsically unsuitable 

for research on the role of interlingual interference in second language gender 

acquisition and production. 

Although there are no studies directly concerned with the topic of this 

article, a lot of psycholinguistic research has been done to explore how a second 

language is stored and processed and how it interacts with the first language. In 

the first part of this article the relevant findings of this research will be reviewed, 

together with findings concerning grammatical gender in the first language. In 

the second part, a hypothesis about interlingual interference in second language 

gender production will be formulated and tested in two experiments. Data from 

these experiments will also be used to explore intralingual interference. At the 

end of each section, the results of the experiments and analyses will be discussed 

and, where appropriate, compared with results of similar experiments in first 

languages. 

1.1 Lexical processing by bilinguals 

In the human mind, information about words is stored in a mental lexicon. 

Lexical units are retrieved on the basis of their meaning. First, a preverbal 

message is formulated, which involves the activation and retrieval of relevant 

2

Interlingual and Intralingual Interference 

concepts. From these the activation spreads to so-called lemmas, lexical units 

which are already specified semantically and syntactically, but not yet 

phonologically. Phonological encoding takes place at the next level of speech 

production, where the units are called phonological forms. In the final stage, 

articulation is initiated and executed (Levelt et al. 1999). 

The first attempt to answer the question of whether the words of two 

languages are stored in one or two lexicons was made already in 1963 by Kolers 

(1963). Today it is generally assumed that whereas the units at the conceptual 

level are shared across languages, lemmas and phonological forms (with the 

exception of cognates) are language-specific, but stored together in one lexicon. 

The preferred hypothesis in psycholinguistic research (De Bot 1992, 

Poulisse 1997) about lexical storage in the bilingual mind is the Subset 

Hypothesis, first formulated by Paradis (1987). According to this hypothesis, 

there is only one storage system. The links between its units are strengthened by 

repeated usage. Consequently, the units of one language are connected with each 

other more strongly than they are with the units from another language, which 

results in emergence of subsets. Each subset contains units from one and the 

same language and can be accessed separately. 

Most theories of bilingual and second language lexical access further 

assume that speakers do not initially select the language-appropriate system 

(subset) before making a lexical search, but that lexical access is language 

independent and both systems are activated and searched simultaneously (De Bot 

1992, Green 1993, Poulisse & Bongaerts 1994, Hermans et al. 1998, Grosjean, 

1998). Hence the lexical processes operating on a bilingual lexicon are 

principally the same as those operating on a monolingual one. The relationship 

between translation equivalents could be compared to that of near-synonyms in 

one language: The not-to-be-selected first language lemma is activated during the 

lemma selection process of its foreign language equivalent, just as semantically 

related first language lemmas are. Hermans and his colleagues (Hermans et al. 

1998) found evidence that the competition between the to-be-selected foreign 

language lemma and its first language translation equivalent is as strong as the 

3

Denisa Bordag 

competition between near-synonyms, because both lemmas turned out to be 

phonologically encoded during picture naming (with distractors) in a foreign 

language (similarly to the way near synonyms are: see Jescheniak & Schriefers 

1998, Peterson & Savoy 1998). 

The subjective frequencies of foreign language lemmas are, however, 

generally low, and the links between them weak in comparison with the 

frequencies of first language lemmas and the strength of connections between 

them. It is therefore difficult to overcome their activation during second language 

production (Hermans et al. 1998). The competition with interfering first language 

lemmas then could be one of the reasons why the production of a word in a 

foreign language requires considerably more time than in a first language (e.g. 

Kroll & Curley 1988, Potter et al.1984) and why unintended code switching 

occurs, as well as cross-linguistic interference in general. 

Theories concerned with how second language speakers (and bilinguals) 

control their language production (Green 1998, Grosjean 1997, 1998) assume 

that language systems can be at different levels of activation and that in order to 

speak one language rather than another its activation level must exceed that of 

the other language (Paradis 1981, Grosjean 1988 and later). A further notion is 

that regulation is achieved through the modification of levels of activation of 

language networks, or items within these networks, rather than via a simple 

switch mechanism (De Bot & Schreuder 1993, Grainger & Dijkstra 1992, 

Grosjean 1988, Paradis 1981). 

Grosjean (1997, 1998) proposes that the activation and deactivation of 

language systems allows bilinguals to achieve different language modes. In the 

monolingual mode, one language is the base language and the other is 

deactivated at least partially. In contrast, in the bilingual mode (the other extreme 

of the bilingual continuum), when individuals are speaking with somebody with 

whom they can code-switch or mix languages, both languages are relatively 

active, but the activation of the base language is greater. As for the second 

language speakers, it is assumed that they cannot prevent their first language 

from being at least partly activated and thus interfering with the production of 

4


their speech in the foreign language (Green 1986, 1993, De Bot & Schreuder 

1993). 

2. Interlingual Interference 

On the basis of this information it is possible to hypothesize that one of the 

reasons why acquisition and production of grammatical gender causes so many 

difficulties for second language speakers at all levels of proficiency is the 

interference from their first language. During second language production, both 

language systems are activated and searched in parallel: If a second language 

speaker wants to produce a nominal phrase in his or her second language, the 

lemmas of the corresponding first language translation equivalents and their 

grammatical features are also activated and may thus interfere with second 

language production. 

The prominent models of first language production (Levelt 1989, Levelt et 

al. 1999, Dell 1986) assume that the information concerning grammatical gender 

is stored in the form of generic gender nodes at the lemma level. Lemmas of all 

nouns of the same gender are thus connected to one gender node common to 

them all. If gender information is necessary for further encoding, all activated 

gender nodes compete for selection and the most highly activated one (usually 

the one of the target lemma) is finally selected. If we expand this hypothesis to 

the representation of second language grammatical gender, we might assume that 

if two languages have the same number and type of grammatical gender, their 

lemmas are all mapped onto one set of gender nodes. This assumption is 

supported by theories stressing the fact that the incomplete second language 

system takes over, or inherits, all it possibly can from the first language 

(Competition Model by Mac Whinney 1997), i.e. possibly including the generic 

gender nodes as well. 

The hypothesis to be tested, concerning the interlingual interference during 

the second language production of grammatical gender, thus reads as follows: If 

the gender of a first language noun differs from that of its to-be-selected second 

language translation equivalent, their lemmas compete for selection and with 

5

Denisa Bordag 

them their corresponding gender nodes, which they automatically activate. 

Selection of the second language lemma should thus be delayed and subjects 

should produce more gender errors compared to the condition where both 

translation equivalents have congruent genders. We will use the term gender 

interference effect to refer to the negative effect of the first language gender on 

the selection of the gender of its second language translation equivalent. 

Conceptualization 

 

Grammatical 

encoding 

(lemmas) 

I 

I 

I 

I 

, I Phonological 

 

encoding 

(phonological forms) 

[hrad] 

Articulation 

Figure I: Gender interference effect: The gender node of the target second language word "hrad" 

(castle, masculine in Czech) competes for selection with the gender node of its automatically 

activated first language translation equivalent "burg" (feminine in German). 

2.1 Experiments 

Two experiments were constructed to explore whether such a gender interference 

effect indeed exists. Two languages, German and Czech, were chosen to be 

employed in these experiments. Both these languages have grammatical gender 

and the number and type of their genders is identical: masculine, feminine and 

6


neuter. Despite these similarities, the languages differ in how the three genders 

are assigned to their nouns: Approximately half of their translation equivalents 

have identical genders while the other half does not. There is also no 1:1 

mapping between the genders of Czech and German nouns: It is impossible to 

say that e.g. most German feminines correspond to Czech neuters or the other 

way around. German learners of Czech (and vice versa) thus have to learn the 

appropriate gender with every single noun they acquire. Sometimes the gender 

(especially of Czech nouns) can be guessed from their terminations, but this 

method is not very reliable as there is no ending in the Czech or German 

language (apart from some derivational suffixes), which would unambiguously 

mark e.g. only feminine nouns and not any other. 

2.1.1 Experimental design 

In both experiments, subjects had to name pictures in their second language in 

two conditions: either with a bare noun (short condition) or with an adjective of 

size (big or small) and a noun (long condition). Noun phrases with adjective + 

noun and not solely article + noun were chosen, because Czech as contrasted to 

German does not have any articles. On the other hand, adjectives in both 

languages have to agree in gender with their head nouns. Half of the nouns 

chosen for the experiment had congruent gender in both languages, the other half 

did not. The assumption was that production of noun phrases (and nouns) with 

congruent gender in both languages would be faster than production of those 

with different gender in German and Czech. To create optimal conditions in 

which the first language is most likely (and most strongly) activated, it was 

decided to keep subjects as close to the bilingual end of the bilingual continuum 

(Grosjean 1997) as possible. First language fillers were therefore included into 

the experiment, so that one third (22) of the pictures was to be named in the 

subjects' first and two thirds (44) in their second language. 

2.1.2 Participants 

Eighteen subjects participated in each experiment. The German subjects tested in 

the Czech experiment (Czech was the second language) were mostly students of 

West Slavic studies, started to learn Czech after their 16th year (at 20 years on 

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Denisa Bordag 

average) and had been learning Czech for 4.6 years on average. The Czech 

participants tested in the German experiment (German was the second language) 

started to learn German after their 8th year (at 14 on average) and had been 

learning German for 8.4 years on average. Many of them experienced long 

periods when they were not using German at all, so although they had been 

learning German almost twice as long as the German subjects, their proficiency 

in the foreign language was on average not exceedingly higher than that of the 

German subjects. The proficiency of the subjects was judged on the basis of an 

informal interview in subjects" second language at the beginning of the 

experiment, the information they provided in the questionnaire and their rating of 

their familiarity with the experimental items. Most German subjects have already 

passed or were just about to take the German equivalent of the English B.A. 

exams in Czech Studies (Zwischenpriifung). All Czech participant had sufficient 

knowledge of German to study at this language at the University of Leipzig. 

Highly advanced subjects or subjects below the level of intermediate were not 

tested or not included in the analysis. All subjects were paid for their 

participation. 

2.1.3 Materials 

The target stimuli were 72 line drawings in the Czech and 70 in the German 

experiment. Pictures of forty-four nouns were chosen as experimental items, 

none of them were cognates. The experimental items were partly different for 

each experiment to match all conditions (see below). The gender of half of the 

nouns was congruent with that of their translation equivalents (e.g. strom and 

Baum, both rnasculines), the gender of the other half differed from that of their 

translation equivalents (e.g. obraz (masculine) and BUd (neuter». They were all 

easily-depictable concrete nouns with high frequency both in Czech and in 

German. The majority of the experimental items were monomorphemic and 

inanimate. Each set of 22 nouns consisted of 8 masculines, 8 feminines and 6 

neuters. Their length ranged between one and three syllables and each set 

contained the same number of mono-, di- and trisyllabic masculine, feminine and 

8


neuter nouns. The sets were also matched for final letter to control for the 

possible influence of phonological form on gender selection. 

Next to 44 experimental items, there were also 22 first language filler items 

and 14 practice items. They were also very frequent in both languages. Some of 

the fillers were used as practice items as well. 

2.1.4 Procedure 

The experimental session had three parts and lasted approximately 40 minutes. 

Participants were tested individually. 

The first part started with a short informal dialogue in the second language 

to test whether the subject is a suitable candidate for the experiment. Then, 

subjects were presented with instructions emphasizing both the speed and 

accuracy of their responses and with a booklet containing all 72 (70) pictures, 

which would later appear in the experiment. Under each picture, its first language 

name and its second language translation equivalent were printed. Subjects were 

asked to rate on a 7-point scale 1) how well the picture depicted the first 

language word, 2) how well it depicted the second language word and 3) how 

familiar they were with the second word. The ratings were done to ensure that 

participants really study the names of the pictures and to obtain data for 

evaluations of the stimuli materials and of subjects' familiarity with the second 

language words. The ratings also allowed the experimenter to control for whether 

the words in either the gender congruent or gender-incongruent set were not less 

familiar or less well-depicted than the words in the other set. Later analyses 

showed that all words were equally well-depicted and very well known to all 

participants. (Total rating in the Czech experiment was 6.48 in the congruent and 

6.45 in the incongruent group; in the German experiment 6.58 and 6.55 in the 

congruent and incongruent group, respectively). 

In the second part of the experimental session the experiment proper was 

run. Before the experiment started, participants were presented with a sheet 

containing Czech and German examples of noun phrases, which were to be used 

in the experiment's long condition. Attention was not explicitly drawn to 

grammatical gender. 

9

Denisa Bordag 

The experimental session started with a block of 14 practice items, which 

was the same for all subjects in each experiment. Each trial started with a visual 

fixation point (= * =) presented on a grey background for 600 ms on the right of 

the screen in the middle of an imaginary square in which the target picture was 

displayed later. Then, either a yellow or a blue background appeared for 300 ms. 

The colour of the background defined the language in which the response was 

required. Half of the subjects in each experiment had to respond in Czech when a 

picture was displayed on a blue background and in German when a yellow 

background appeared, the other half of the subjects had the colours reversed. 

Following this pause, a target picture was presented in the imaginary square on 

the right of the computer screen and marked with a black arrow pointing at it 

from the upper right part of the screen. In the long condition, two pictures of the 

same object appeared simultaneously on the screen: The target picture marked 

with an arrow on its usual position on the right part of the screen and either a 

larger or a smaller control picture of the same object on the left. When the left 

control picture was larger than the target picture, the subjects had to name the 

target picture with the adjective "small"; if the left control picture was smaller 

than the target picture, subjects had to name the target picture with the adjective 

"big". Naming latencies were measured from the right or both pictures onset by a 

voice key. 

The display colour of the arrow was contingent on the participant's 

response. It turned white as soon as a vocal response was initiated. However, if 

no response was registered within 5000 ms (time out) the arrow turned red. 

When the participant was ready for the next trial, he or she pressed the space bar 

on the keyboard and after a pause of 300 ms the fixation point of the new trial 

was displayed. 

Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two main randomisation 

versions in each experiment. Each item was presented in a long and in a short 

condition. Half of the subjects in each experiment saw the items in the long 

condition first; the other half saw the items in the short condition first. Within 

each subject, half of the items were long first, the other half were short first. The 

10


two main versions of the experiment differed with respect to which items were 

long first. 

Individual randomisations within the two main versions were prepared for 

each subject with the following restrictions: No more than 3 trials of the same 

condition (long vs. short), the same size (big vs. small) and the same gender 

(masculine, feminine, neuter) were allowed to follow each other. The same 

language of response was allowed in maximally 4 successive trials. 

In the third part of the experimental session, subjects filled in a 

questionnaire concerning their proficiency in the second language and their 

language background. 

2.1.5 Results and discussion 

A total of 352 (14.80/0) observations in the Czech experiment and 443 

(18.60/0) in the German experiment were marked as incorrect. Observations were 

discarded mainly due to voice-key errors, gender errors and task errors (picture 

named in the wrong language, with the wrong adjective etc.). The cut-off was 

two standard deviations from a subject's mean response time in the long and 

short condition. 

Analyses of variance (ANOYAs) were performed on the mean naming 

latencies per subject (FI) and per item (F2) in each experiment. Overall, naming 

latencies for pictures with names from the gender-incongruent set were slower 

than naming latencies for pictures with congruent gender in both languages. Both 

analysis with subjects as a random factor and with items as a random factor 

showed a significant effect on condition (congruent vs. incongruent) at the 

p

Denisa Bordag 

Table 1. 

Results of the Czech experiment with reaction times in ms 

and % of errors in each experimental conditon. 

Czech exp, Congruent Incongruent Interf, effect 

RT %e RT %e 

Short 1202 1.4 1276 1.3 +74 

Long 1642 3.9 1703 4.1 + 61 

Table 2. 

Results of the German experiment with reaction times in ms 

and % of errors in each experimental condition. 

German exp, Congruent Incongruent Interf. effect 

RT %e RT %e 

Short 1136 1.8 1240 2.4 +104 

Long 1410 3.9 1489 5.9 +79 

As the Tables 1 and 2 show, reaction times in the Czech experiment were 

numerically slower and the interference effect smaller compared to the German 

experiment (though no statistic comparison can be made, because different 

subjects were tested in both experiments). Rather than difference in proficiency 

(subjects in the Czech experiment made less errors than those in the German 

experiment), this might suggest different experimental strategies employed by 

the Czech and German subjects: Whereas German subjects preferred a correct 

answer to speed (which might have caused that the interference effect partly 

"disappeared" in the long naming latencies), Czech subjects probably mostly 

opted for the reversed strategy. 

To examine whether the gender interference effect obtained in the RT 

analysis also showed up in the error analysis, a Qui-square test for the given 

probabilities was performed on the number of gender errors in the gendercongruent 

and gender-incongruent conditions. The test reached significance in 

both experiments (p


induces more gender errors in the adjective + noun condition than when the 

genders of the translation equivalents are congruent in both languages. 

Table 3. 

Number of gender errors in both experiments in the long condition. 

number of gender errors 

Czech experiment 

German experiment 

Congruent condition 22 48 

Incongruent condition 52 90 

Three important results were obtained in the experiment. First, the 

response latencies were longer if the gender of a second language noun differed 

from that of its first language translation equivalent. Second, more gender errors 

were produced if genders of translation equi valents were incongruent. These two 

results support the initial hypothesis that there is a gender interference effect from 

the first language during second language production of grammatical gender. 

Interestingly, and this is the third important result, the gender interference effect 

was obtained not only in the long condition, where the information about 

grammatical gender was necessary to encode the adjecti ve agreement ending, but 

also in the short condition, when only a bare noun was named. 

In this aspect the gender interference effect differs from a gender 

distraction effect obtained in picture-word distractor experiments in some native 

languages, e.g. in German and Dutch (German: Schriefers & Truel 2000, van 

Berkum 1997, Dutch: Schriefers 1993, La Heij et al. 1998; for overview: 

Schriefers & Jescheniak 1999). In these experiments subjects had to name 

pictures either when gender congruent or a gender incongruent word distractor 

was present. In these experiments, similarly to those described above, slower 

reaction times and more gender errors were obtained when the target picture and 

word distractor had different genders than when their genders agreed. This effect 

was, however, consistently obtained only when the gender was required by the 

syntactic environment, i.e. by naming with a gender-marked nominal phrase. The 

difference between the two effects may be due to the fact that whereas the picture 

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Denisa Bordag 

name and word distractor in the first language experiments were usually 

semantically unrelated words, the two translation equivalents are semantically 

identical (or at least very close) and share a common concept. Consequently, it 

might be the case that the competition between gender nodes is stronger if the 

two relevant lemmas share the same concept and that under this condition the 

not-to-be-selected gender node interferes and competes for selection even when 

it is not needed by the syntactic environment. More experiments are, however, 

necessary in order to explain the difference between the two effects satisfactorily. 

3. Intralingual interference 

In the next step, the role of intralingual interference during second language 

production of grammatical gender shall be explored. According to Richards 

(1971) intralingual interferece "reflects the general characteristics of rule 

learning such as a faulty generalisation, incomplete application of rules and 

failure to learn conditions under which rules apply". A typical manifestation of 

an intralingual interference is thus overgeneralization. 

As already mentioned above, the gender of German and especially Czech 

nouns can be partly derived from a word's termination. In Czech, there is a 

typical termination for each gender (monomorphemic words): -a for feminines, 

o for neutrals and a consonant for masculines, in German this is only partly true 

(see below). In both languages it is, however, possible to formulate rules on the 

basis of which a large number of nouns can be assigned a particular gender 

according to their termination. One way in which intralingual interference during 

second language production can be manifested is hence overgeneralization of 

these regularities between a noun's grammatical gender and its termination. To 

find out whether this kind of intralingual interference appears in the data, the 

gender errors made in the long conditions in both experiments were analyzed. 

4.1 Gender errors analysis 

A detailed analysis of gender errors made by subjects in both experiments in the 

long condition revealed a consistent pattern: Subjects made most gender errors in 

agreement with nouns which had either an ambiguous or an atypical termination 

14


for their gender. In these cases, subjects mostly assigned to these nouns a gender 

which they "should have had" according to their termination. Figure 1 presents 

an overview of average number of agreement errors for items with particular 

termination in the first experiment (Czech). 

Figure 1. 

Average number of errors for particular terminations within each gender 

in the Czech experiment. 

[I-c 

.-e 

D-a 

ml-o 

mase. I-cl fern. [-a] neut. [-0] 

A typical termination for masculine nouns in Czech is a consonant (e.g. strom 

(M) - tree), for feminine -a (e.g. kniha (F) - book) and for neutral -0 (e.g. m sto 

(N) - town). Figure 1 shows that if the experimental nouns had a gender 

predictable from their terminations, subjects made almost no agreement errors. 

The vowel -e is from this aspect an ambiguous termination in Czech, because 

nouns ending with -e are usually either feminine or neuter (e.g. iidle (F) - chair 

and slunce (N) - sun). As obvious from the table, the number of agreement 

errors with these nouns was higher. Typically, if the participants made a gender 

error in agreement with a feminine noun ending with -e, it was because they took 

it for a neuter (e.g. *male(N) iidle - small chair), and vice versa (e.g. *mald(F) 

slunce - small sun). Most errors were made in agreement with feminine nouns 

ending with a consonant (mys(F) - mouse). As mentioned above, a final 

consonant is a termination typical for masculine nouns (there are only a few 

derived Czech masculine nouns which end with a vowel) and though the number 

of Czech feminine nouns ending with a consonant is quite large, it is still 

15

Denisa Bordag 

considered an atypical feminine ending. Characteristically, almost all feminine 

nouns ending with a consonant were considered masculine by the subjects 

(*maly(M) mys - small mouse), 

The situation was similar in the second experiment (German) as 

summarized in Figure 2. 

Figure 2. 

Average number of errors for particular terminations within each gender 

in the German experiment. 

5 

4,5 

4 

3,5 

3 

2,5 

2 

1,5 

1 

0,5 

o 

rnasc. [-cl neut. [-cl fern. [-e] 

In this experiment, the variety of the noun terminations was not so large as in the 

Czech experiment: The experimental nouns ended either with a consonant or 

with -e. This reflects the situation in German inflectional morphology, which is 

less rich than in Czech. The only typical termination in this experiment was -e, 

marking predictably German feminine nouns (e.g. Brucke'F) - bridge). As 

clearly seen from the table, almost no gender errors were made with these nouns 

(one error on each such item on average in both conditions in the whole 

experiment). A consonant must be considered an ambiguous termination in 

German, because it is a usual ending for both masculine and neuter nouns (e.g. 

Kopf(M) - head and Herz(N) - heart). It is thus not surprising that subjects often 

confused German masculine nouns with neuter ones (e.g. *kleines(N) Kopfsmall 

head) and vice versa (*kleiner(M) Her: - small heart). (The average 

16


number of gender errors for neuter nouns in both conditions was 3.75, for 

masculine nouns 4.8.). A possible interpretation of the fact that subjects made 

more gender errors in this experiment (138 compared to 74 in the Czech 

experiment), thus might be that in German participants could rely less on a word 

termination as a source of information about grammatical gender. If they did, it 

often resulted in agreement errors, because the correlation between word 

termination and grammatical gender is generally lower in German than in Czech. 

The results of the gender errors analysis clearly shows that intralingual 

interference affected the gender production in both experiments as well: Subjects 

clearly overgeneralized the phonological rules for gender assignment in both 

languages and applied them to nouns with different gender as well. This effect 

was stronger in Czech than in German, because the correlation between 

grammatical gender and word termination is more straightforward in this 

language. The analysis further showed that phonological form of a word plays an 

important role in second language grammatical gender production and that 

subjects take word termination into account during gender selection. 

It is noteworthy that the way the phonological form of a noun affects the 

gender assignment in a second language is similar to the way a noun termination 

influences gender assignment in the child language. Overgeneralizations of 

typical terminations and difficulties with gender of nouns with ambiguous or 

atypical terminations have been observed in the language of both Czech and 

German children. Henzel (1975), who published probably the only article on this 

topic concerning acquisition of the first language Czech reports error free gender 

production with nouns with a "clear-cut phonological form" and states that: 

"the child learning to speak Czech gives preference to those gender categories 

which are least ambiguous rather than to those that are most frequent; he 

attends to the consonant ending with masculine, to the a-ending with feminine, 

and to the a-ending with neuter" (Henzel 1975, 189) 

More evidence about first language gender acquisition has been collected about 

German. In her monography on gender acquisition by German and English 

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Denisa Bordag 

children, Mills (1986) observes that similarly to the second language learners, 

also German children have least problems with acquisition of feminine gender of 

nouns ending with -e and show difficulties with acquisition of gender of nouns 

with consonantal termination. 

4. Conclusion 

According to the results of this study there seem to be at least three factors 

affecting gender production in a second language: 

(1) The gender of the corresponding first language translation equivalent 

(interlingual interference/transfer). 

(2) The phonological form of the to-be-selected second language noun 

(intralingual interference/transfer), 

(3) Gender information saved on the second language lemma (otherwise 

subjects would not be able to produce the correct gender of nouns whose 

gender differs from that of their first language translation equivalent 

and/or has an atypical termination). 

The gender errors reported in the language of Czech and German children 

are also in accordance with the hypothesis that at least in the early stages of 

language acquisition children assign gender on the basis of phonological form of 

a noun. As native speakers later achieve full competence in gender production 

and can retrieve grammatical gender very fast without making errors, it is 

assumed by the models of adult language speech production that the information 

about grammatical gender is stored. 

Inlight of the findings reported in this paper it however does not seem to be 

necessarily the case that grammatical gender of second language nouns is stored 

as their inherent property in the same way as it is assumed for native languages. 

It is more likely that the grammatical gender of second language nouns is 

computed each time it is needed anew on the basis of stored information, 

information coming from the first language lemmas and information coming 

from the phonological form. In this aspect the second language gender 

production seems to be closer to the child than to the adult language processing. 

18


Interestingly, effects similar to those in the child language were observed with 

quite proticient second language learners and with nouns belonging to the core of 

basic vocabulary in our experiments. It would be interesting to see whether the 

same interference effects could be obtained with second language speakers of 

near-native proficiency, or whether it is possible for the second language learners 

to reach a processing stage equivalent to that of adult native language speakers. 

The critical period is likely to play a role here. 

The influence of phonological form is of crucial importance for the models 

of speech production, because it would assume a feedback activation between the 

level of phonological forms and the lemma level, where gender selection takes 

place. Whereas this idea is compatible with models permitting bottom-up 

processes like the Interactive Activation Model of Dell (1986), it is incompatible 

with strictly serial models without feedback like the one of Levelt (1989, Levelt 

et al. 1999). However, it is not possible to decide on the basis of our data, 

whether the effect of phonological form could not be also a post-lexical strategy 

which the subjects use to solve the problem of gender assignment in cases where 

the usual mechanisms fail. If the feedback from the phonological form is 

however an automatic process, speech production models which aspire to explain 

both the first and second language production and which do not permit bottomup 

processes would have to reconsider their claims. Further experiments are 

clearly necessary to answer this question and many others concerning gender 

production and representation in second languages. 

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Appendix 

Items used in Experiments 1 and 2 in both conditions. The lists contain the target 

L2 words, their L1 translation equivalents (with their corresponding genders) and 

the English translation. 

Experiment 1 

Gender congruent group 

Gender incongruent group 

Czech (L2) German (L1) English Czech (L2) German (L1) English 

Mf m Ball m ball Nos m Nase f nose 

Pes m Hund m dog Byt m Wohnung f flat 

Vlak m Zug m train hrad m Burg f castle 

21

Denisa Bordag 

Strom m Baum m tree most m Brticke f bridge 

Dopis m Brief m letter obraz m Bild n picture 

Kabat m Mantel m coat kostel m Kirche f church 

M sic m Mond m moon darek m Geschenk n present 

Koberec m Teppich m carpet pomeran m Orange f orange 

Mys F Maus f mouse Lo f Schiff n ship 

Ruka F Hand f hand noha f FuB m foot 

Svf ka F Kerze f candle kniha f Buch n book 

Mapa F Karte f map hlava f Kopf m head 

Sprcha F Dusche f shower ryba f Fisch m fish 

Ko ka F Katze f cat zidle f Stuhl ill chair 

Tabule F Tafel f blackboard vesnice f Dorf n village 

Koruna F Krone f crown zmrzlina f Eis n ice-cream 

Srdce n Herz n heart raj e n Tomate f tomato 

Pole n Feld n field slunce n Sonne f sun 

Oko n Auge n eye m sto n Stadt f city 

Ucho n Ohr n ear vino n Wein m wine 

Okno n Fenster n window k eslo n Sessel m arm-chair 

Letadlo n Flugzeug n plane zrcadlo n Spiegel m mirror 

Experiment 2 

Gender congruent group 

Gender incongruent group 

English 

German (L2) Czech (Ll) German (L2) Czech (Ll) English 

Ball m Mf m ball Fuss m noha f foot 

Hund m Pes m dog Stuhl m zidle f chair 

Zug m Vlak m train Kopf m hlava f head 

Baum m Strom m tree Wein m vino n wine 

Brief m Dopis m letter Fisch m ryba f fish 

Zahn m Zub m tooth Schrank m sk f f wardrobe 

22


Teller m Tall m plate Sessel m k eslo n arm-chair 

Teppich m Koberec m carpet Spiegel m zrcadlo n mirror 

Maus f Mys f mouse Burg f hrad m castle 

Hand f Ruka f hand Stadt f m sto n city 

Kerze f Svf ka f candle Nase f nos m nose 

Rose f R ze f map Sonne f slunce n son 

Dusche f Sprcha f shower Brticke f most m bridge 

Katze f Ko ka f cat Kirche f kostel m church 

Tafel f Tabule f blackboard Butter f maslo n butter 

Krone f Koruna f crown Tomate f raj e n tomato 

Herz n Srdce n heart Schiff n 10 f ship 

Feld n Pole n field Bett n postel f bed 

Ei n Vejce n egg Pferd n k m horse 

Ohr n Ucho n ear Dorf n vesnice f village 

Fenster n Okno n window Eis n zmrzlina f ice-cream 

Flugzeug n Letadlo n plane Geschenk n darek m present 

Denisa Bordag 

lnstitut fur Linguistik 

Universitat Leipzig 

BeethovenstraBe 15 

04107 Leipzig 

Germany 

e-mail: denisav@gmx.net 

23

Interlingual and Intralingual Interference during Gender Production

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