Semantic and affective priming have long been treated separately in psycholinguistic studies. Recently, however, the question of whether and how these two primings interact has become controversial, especially in cross-language contexts where such discussions are rare. In the present study, four mixed-design experiments were conducted with Chinese EFL learners to investigate cross-language semantic-affective interactions: 3 (prime valence: negative, positive, neutral) × 2 (semantic relatedness: related, unrelated). Results show that semantic priming effects occurred in the L1L1 and L1L2 conditions, whereas affective priming effects were observed in the L2L2 condition. In the L2L1 priming condition, only emotion primes induced cross-language priming. These results suggest that semantic and emotional accesses are activated automatically and separately, but can facilitate cross-language word processing mutually. The results support the hierarchical representation of semantic features of emotion words from L1 to L2 in the unbalanced bilingual mental lexicon, while affective attributes are spread across a distributed network.

Word-initial obstruent-liquid clusters, frequent in English (e.g., blue), are prohibited in Korean. Korean learners of English perceptually repair illicit word-initial consonant sequences with an epenthetic vowel [ʊ]. Thus they might perceive blue as b[ʊ]lue, and, at least initially, also represent it lexically as a disyllabic word. We ask whether the sound sequences permitted in one's L1 influence the way L2 words are represented in the mental lexicon. If they do, we predict that in a lexical decision task, Korean learners will accept nonwords containing epenthetic vowels ([bʊˈluː] for blue) as real English words more often than English listeners. These predictions were confirmed: we observed high error rates on test nonwords ([bʊˈluː]) by the Korean participants only, accompanied by few errors on control nonwords ([bɪˈluː]), suggesting that learners’ lexical representations for familiar L2 words can be activated by nonwords that obey their L1 phonotactic grammar.

Most research on cognates has focused on words presented in isolation that are easily defined as cognate between L1 and L2. In contrast, this study investigates what counts as cognate in authentic texts and how such cognates are read. Participants with L1 Danish read news articles in their highly proficient L2, English, while their eye-movements were monitored. The experiment shows a cognate advantage for morphologically simple words, but only when cognateness is defined relative to translation equivalents that are appropriate in the context. For morphologically complex words, a cognate disadvantage is observed which may be due to problems of integrating cognate with non-cognate morphemes. The results show that fast non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon is conditioned by the communicative context. Importantly, a range of variables are statistically controlled in the regression analyses, including word predictability indexed by the conditional probability of each word.

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.