L2 primes L1-translation priming in LDT and semantic categorisation with unbalanced bilinguals

The aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2-L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a sematic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2-L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been recorded in SCT but only for exemplars. In the present study, significant L2-L1 priming has been found in both tasks. Furthermore, in SCT L2-L1 priming was significant not only for exemplars but also for non-exemplars. However, the effect was stronger for exemplars than for non-exemplars. Such a pattern of results is discussed with respect to current models of lexical representation and language processing in bilinguals.