Abstract:
A bilingual primed lexical decision task was used to investigate priming effects produced by
attended and ignored words. Participants were required to name prime target words in their
weaker (L2) language and then make lexical decisions to probe target items in their
dominant (L1) language. Accelerated lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when
the word was a translation equivalent of the preceding prime target word, but they were not
impaired when the word was a translation equivalent of the preceding ignored nontarget
word. This novel finding of a positive priming effect coupled with the absence of a negative
priming effect is the opposite pattern of earlier cross-language experiments wherein priming
was assessed from L1 to L2 [i.e., Li, Neumann, & Chen, 2017. Identity and semantic negative
priming in rapid serial visual presentation streams. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 79,
1755–1776; Neumann, McCloskey, & Felio, 1999. Cross-language positive priming disappears,
negative priming does not: evidence for two sources of selective inhibition. Memory &
Cognition, 27, 1051–1063; Nkrumah & Neumann, 2018. Cross-language negative priming
remains intact, while positive priming disappears: evidence for two sources of selective
inhibition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 3, 1–12]. The present results may be a reflection of
altered excitatory and inhibitory dynamics when a weaker, non-dominant language is the
source for potential positive and negative priming effects between languages in bilinguals.
