Cross-language positive priming disappears, negative priming does not: Evidence for two sources of selective inhibition

The authors used a unilingual and bilingual primed lexical decision task to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored words. In the unilingual experiment, accelerated lexical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the preceding target word, whereas slowed l exical decisions to probe target words resulted when the word matched the p receding ignored nontarget word. In the bilingual (English-Spanish) experim ent, between-language, rather than within-language, priming manipulations w ere used. Although the ignored repetition negative priming effect replicate d across languages, cross-language attended repetition positive priming did not. This dissociation of priming effects in the inter versus intralanguag e priming conditions contradicts episodic retrieval accounts of negative pr iming that deny the existence of selective inhibitory processes. On the oth er hand, these results support an extension of inhibition-based accounts of negative priming, because they indicate that inhibition can operate at two levels of abstraction-local word and global language-simultaneously.