Sá-Leite Dias, Ana RitaFlores, CristinaEira, CarinaHaro Rodríguez, JuanComesaña Vila, Montserrat2023-07-132023-07-132023Sá-Leite, A. R., Flores, C., Eira, C., Haro, J., Comesaña, M. (2023). Language balance rather than age of acquisition: A study on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect in Portuguese–German bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S13667289230003781366-7289http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30876The cross-linguistic gender congruency effect (GCE; a facilitation on gender retrieval for translations of the same gender) is a robust phenomenon analysed almost exclusively with late bilinguals. However, it is important to ascertain whether it is modulated by age of acquisition (AoA) and language proficiency. We asked 64 early and late bilinguals of European Portuguese and German to do a forward and backward translation task. A measure of language balance was calculated through the DIALANG test. Analyses included this factor along with the gender congruency between translations, the target language, and the AoA of both languages, among others. Results showed a GCE for European Portuguese that was independent of the AoA and greater the higher the language imbalance. We propose that changes in proficiency in any of the languages create situations of dependency between them which allow cross-linguistic gender interaction to occur and effects to emerge depending on gender transparencyeng© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial usehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Age of acquisitionBilingualismLanguage balanceGender congruency effectGrammatical genderProficiencyjournal article10.1017/S13667289230003781469-1841open access