Effects of dual grammatical gender systems on conceptual representations in simultaneous bilinguals : evidence from Ukrainian-Russian speakers across behavioural and neural measures

Osypenko, Oleksandra and Brandt, Silke and Casaponsa, Aina (2025) Effects of dual grammatical gender systems on conceptual representations in simultaneous bilinguals : evidence from Ukrainian-Russian speakers across behavioural and neural measures. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This PhD thesis investigates how grammatical gender influences cognitive processes in simultaneous bilinguals of Ukrainian and Russian. Specifically, it examines whether simultaneous bilinguals of two threegendered languages (neuter, feminine, and masculine genders) exhibit grammatical gender effects from their first languages (L1s) on conceptual representations when tested in genderless English. Four experiments were conducted using behavioural and/or electrophysiological (EEG) measures across three empirical studies: participants engaged in similarity ratings (Chapter 3), memory recall (Chapter 4), and non-verbal categorisation (Chapter 5) tasks. Each experiment included stimuli with both matching and mismatching genders across two L1s, allowing assessment of overall gender effects when genders overlap, and the influence of participants’ more proficient L1 when genders mismatch. Findings revealed that grammatical gender modulated cognition in simultaneous bilinguals, but only under specific conditions. Specifically, when nouns with neuter gender were excluded from the stimuli (Chapter 3), or when the task had moderate to high gender salience (Chapters 3 and 4), participants showed stronger effects of grammatical gender on their responses. These effects were particularly pronounced when grammatical gender was matching across both languages (emerged in both similarity rating and memory recall tasks), compared to the nouns matching in participants’ more proficient L1 (only in similarity ratings). However, in a low-salience EEG task (Chapter 5), no significant effects of grammatical gender were observed, suggesting limited automaticity of grammatical gender effects at early perceptual stages. The thesis offers novel theoretical insights into the structuralfeedback hypothesis by demonstrating the context-sensitive nature of the observed effects. It also reopens a previously underexplored question: whether grammatical gender effects extend to speakers of three-gendered languages, and not just those with two-gendered systems (cf. Sera et al., 2002). Overall, this work represents the most comprehensive investigation to date of grammatical gender effects in simultaneous bilinguals of two gendered languages.