Gender, Language, and Bilingualism - New Perspectives on the Processing of Gender Stereotypes

Abstract

Simultaneous bilingual children have been found to show less racial bias than their monolingual peers (Singh et al., 2019; 2020), which was predicted by better cognitive flexibility (Singh et al., 2021). It raises the question whether this can also be found in young adults who are either simultaneous or sequential bilinguals, respectively, and whether other aspects of social cognition, such as gender stereotyping, can also be predicted by cognitive flexibility. To further investigate the relationship between cognitive flexibility, social cognition and the bilingual experience, we set up an English reading EEG experiment. We tested 66 university students who were either Dutch or Spanish L1 speakers. All were sequential English L2 speakers, and around half were, in addition, Dutch-Frisian (n = 16), or Spanish-Catalan (n = 14) simultaneous bilinguals. The stimuli were English sentences with pronouns as critical words (e.g., “The lifeguard threw himself into the water.”). The presentation will discuss the experiment setup, and first behavioural results.