Reduced cross-modal affective priming in the L2 of late bilinguals depends on L2 exposure.

Processing of emotional meaning is crucial in many areas of psychology, including language and music processing. This issue takes on particular significance in bilinguals because it has been suggested that bilinguals process affective words differently in their first (L1) and second, later acquired languages (L2). We undertook a series of five experiments examining affective priming between emotionally valenced language and emotionally valenced music. Adult English monolinguals and two groups of proficient adult late bilinguals (German-English and Italian-English) with recent L2 exposure were examined. Priming effects were investigated using music to prime word targets and words to prime music targets. For both groups of bilinguals, music showed equivalent affective priming of L1 and L2 words, suggesting no difference in deliberate processing of affective meaning. Conversely, when words primed music, L2 words lacked the affective priming strength of L1 words for both late bilingual groups. Among various language background factors, only greater length of residence in the L2 context was positively related to the affective priming strength of L2 words. These results show strong activation of emotional meaning in the L1 of late bilinguals but reduced activation in the L2, where level of activation depends on the duration of everyday exposure to the L2.