Festschrifts

The presence of gender agreement markers prior to the noun speeds recognition of the noun in monolingual speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, Dutch and Polish, but this effect is still understudied for bilingual speakers. The present Visual World eye-tracking study investigated the real-time processing of gender agreement cues on adjectives and verbs to see if they facilitate recognition of the noun in both monolingual and heritage Russian speakers. Participants viewed visual displays in Ambiguous vs. Unambiguous conditions, crossed with MASC or FEM target nouns. Monolingual speakers looked more to the target in Unambiguous than Ambiguous conditions for both FEM (more salient cues) and MASC (null/less salient cues) targets. Heritage speakers (HSs) demonstrated facilitative use of the more salient FEM cues, in line with previous findings, but not MASC cues. We conclude that the morphological saliency of the agreement marker impacts HSs’ ability to access the gender feature and integrate it into the process of spoken word recognition during language comprehension.