Abstract:
In the current experiments, within- and between-language primed lexical decision tasks
with Twi-English bilinguals were used. The aim was to explore the priming effects
produced by attended and ignored words, in an effort to draw theoretical and
empirical parallels and differences between the mechanisms of excitation and
inhibition and to isolate the different circumstances in which these mechanisms
operate in bilingual language processing. In the within-language (Twi) experiment,
facilitatory (positive) priming resulted when a prime word and subsequent probe
target word were identical, whereas delayed decisions to probe targets (negative
priming) ensued when the ignored prime word was conceptually identical to the
subsequent probe target word. In contrast, while the between-language (Twi-English)
experiments replicated the ignored repetition negative priming effect, no evidence of
positive priming was observed. These between-language findings undermine episodic
retrieval models of selective attention that discount inhibitory processes in negative
priming paradigms. Instead, our findings substantiate inhibition-based accounts by
showing that there are two sources of inhibition operating at the local word and
global language levels of abstraction. The findings also support bilingual language
representations in which the words of the two languages are integrated.
