Between two grammatical gender systems: exploring the impact of grammatical gender on memory recall in Ukrainian-Russian simultaneous bilinguals

Research on language and cognition in bilinguals continues to be an important endeavour of the linguistic relativity theory complex (the idea that language affects our thinking, Whorf, 1956). The current study adds to this by introducing simultaneous bilinguals of two languages with distinct grammatical gender systems (Ukrainian and Russian) – unlike the predominant focus on sequential bilinguals with a L1 and a later-acquired L2 (e.g., Phillips & Boroditsky, 2003). It allows us to examine whether the effects of language persist in cases where people have more than one native language with notable grammatical differences, such as two contrasting three-gendered grammatical systems. The current study examines effects three-gendered languages have on cognition, as prior research suggests that stronger effects are found in speakers of two-gendered languages because the binary nature of the system makes grammatical gender more salient (Sera et al., 2002). To examine whether simultaneous bilinguals demonstrate a language effect similar to that of sequential bilinguals, we adapted an object-name memory task (Boroditsky and Schmidt, 2000), where participants are asked to remember prototypical male and female names paired with pictures of conceptually neutral objects with different grammatical genders (e.g., chair Patrick). This methodology has been previously used to examine whether grammatical gender influences concepts and mental representations, with findings showing the enhanced ability to recall a human name if it is congruent with the grammatical gender of the object. In the current study, 100 Ukrainian-Russian simultaneous bilinguals and 40 English monolinguals were asked to memorise object-name pairs and after a short break complete a memory task recalling those names. Our stimulus set included objects with opposite grammatical genders in Ukrainian and Russian (masculine in Ukrainian and feminine in Russian, and vice versa), and nouns with matching genders in both languages (e.g., masculine in both Ukrainian and Russian). Two key predictions were tested using linear mixed models. Firstly, for nouns with matching grammatical gender in both languages, we expected that the bilinguals but not the monolinguals would show a grammatical gender effect. Secondly, for nouns with mismatching grammatical gender among bilingual participants, we anticipated that participants would display an effect of their more proficient language when remembering the names (e.g., if a participant is more proficient in Ukrainian than in Russian, they would tend to remember those names where gender matches Ukrainian and mismatched Russian). As predicted, bilingual participants, but not monolinguals, showed a grammatical gender effect (i.e., better recall for names congruent with the object’s grammatical gender). Thus, suggesting that the effect of language on mental representations of objects might be observed even in speakers of two three-gendered languages when those objects have matching grammatical gender in both of those languages. However, proficiency did not modulate the grammatical gender effect when the objects had contrasting grammatical genders across Ukrainian and Russian. The latter indicates that grammatical gender of the most proficient language of a simultaneous bilingual did not affect mental representations when it mismatched the less proficient language.