Early perceptual effects (or lack thereof) of conflicting grammatical genders: ERP evidence from simultaneous bilinguals

Previous studies revealed that grammatical gender may shape perception and categorisation (Sato et al., 2020), yet the extent of this influence remains unclear, specifically in simultaneous bilinguals with two gendered languages. This pre-registered ERP study investigates how two partially contrasting grammatical gender systems modulate perception in Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals. Participants completed a non-verbal categorisation task assessing associations between primes (depicted nouns with matching or mismatching grammatical genders across L1s) and target (male/female faces). Behavioural results (response types and reaction times) showed that bilinguals were not affected by the prime-target gender congruency for matching primes or by more dominant/proficient L1 for mismatched primes. ERP analyses showed no significant modulations of predicted components (N1, P2/VPP, N300) by grammatical gender for either type of primes. These findings suggest that grammatical gender alone may not independently modulate categorisation process in bilinguals with two gendered L1s, especially when explicit conceptual or semantic activation is not required.