Factors influencing L2 gender processingThe research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council, DFG Pe357-9). We thank Jana Hrachovcová, Nataša Ukropcová, Andreas Opitz and Michael Welt for their help with preparing and running the experiments as well as Dirk Janssen for his help with statistical analyses and Peter Ecke for his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

In four experiments we explored processes underlying L2 gender retrieval. We focused on L1 interference and on the influence of the L2 nouns termination. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tried to manipulate the intensity of L1 interference. We found that L2 speakers cannot eliminate or substantially reduce the interlingual interference neither when they know the response language long in advance in a situation in which code-switching is required (Experiment 1), nor when they are close to the monolingual mode (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 yielded evidence that gender typicality of the L2 nouns termination also exerts an influence on L2 processing, both in production and comprehension. L2 gender thus does not seem to be stored as a fixed feature as it is assumed for L1. Rather, our data support the assumption that it is computed anew each time when needed for processing. Further implications for modeling are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]