Influence Of Gender Difference On Bilingual Language Switching

With the accelerated process of globalization, there are nowadays more and more bilinguals who master two or more than two languages. At present, language switching and language switching costs have become a popular issue of bilingual research. Most of the switching languages involved in the studies abroad belong to the Indo-European language family and much work has been done only in the field of language production. Moreover,most of the studies carried out at home put emphasis on isolated word processing and a few researches take the effect of sentence context into consideration. Furthermore, there are rarely few studies conducted about gender differences in language switching. To fill the gap,this study aims to investigate how gender differences affect bilingual language switching and the symmetry of the switching costs when Chinese-English bilinguals processing target words embedded in sentences. Therefore, this study is intended to mainly answer the following two questions: (1) What are the influences of gender differences on language switching costs? (2) What are the influences of gender differences on the symmetry of language switching costs?Totally 64 non-English majors participated in this study, including 35 female subjects and 29 male subjects. This study also employed a two factor 2 (gender) ×4 (sentence conditions) mixed design and applied eye movement technique which recorded and collected the data for the first fixation duration, gaze duration and regression path duration when subjects were required to read and comprehend sentences in which Chinese or English target words were embedded. Data were collected by software SPSS and a repeated measure of ANOVA was carried out for data analysis.According to the results of data analysis, there were significant switching costs for both backward switches (L2-L1) and forward (L1-L2) switches and it was also found that the switching costs were asymmetric, that is to say, switching from L2 to L1 was much faster than vice versa, and even faster than the lexical retrieval under the non-switch condition where sentences were in Chinese only, but there were not any significant gender differences in language switching and the symmetry of language switching costs, which meant that gender differences had no influences on both language switching costs and the symmetry of switching costs.