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After naming pictures in their second language (L2), bilinguals experience difficulty in naming pictures in their native language (L1). The “L2 after-effect” is a lingering consequence of inhibition applied to L1 to facilitate L2 production. We proposed that the amount of L1 inhibition depends on the relative balance between current activation of L1 and L2. In two experiments, bilinguals performed a blocked picture-naming task which provided a measure of the relative balance between the two languages and indexed whole-language inhibition via the magnitude of the L2 after-effect. The higher the activation level of L1 and the lower the activation level of L2, the bigger the L2 after-effect. The results also reveal an enduring down-regulation of L1 activation level in more language-balanced speakers. The outcomes support the main tenets of the inhibitory account of bilingual language production and indicate a high level of dynamics in the language system.

In this study, we present the first database of pictures and their corresponding psycholinguistic norms for Polish: the CLT database. In this norming study, we used the pictures from Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT): a set of colored drawings of 168 object and 146 actions. The CLT pictures were carefully created to provide a valid tool for multicultural comparisons. The pictures are accompanied by norms for Naming latencies, Name agreement, Goodness of depiction, Image agreement, Concept familiarity, Age of acquisition, Imageability, Lexical frequency, and Word complexity. We also report analyses of predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of objects and actions. Our results show that Name agreement, Concept familiarity, and Lexical frequency are significant predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of both objects and actions. Additionally, Age of acquisition significantly predicts Naming latencies of pictures of objects. The CLT database is freely available at osf.io/gp9qd. The full set of CLT pictures, including additional variants of pictures, is available on request at osf.io/y2cwr.