Individual differences in repetition priming is an often-overlooked area of research. The importance of this neglect becomes evident when considering the criticisms that priming research has received in the last decade concerning reliability. The current researched aimed to investigate whether individual differences in working memory capacity and affective states have differential effects on lexical-semantic repetition priming outcomes based on whether participants were first or second English speakers. Using logistic mixed-effects models to account for subject variation, the current paper investigated a three-way interaction between working memory capacity, negative affect score, and language on repetition priming outcomes. The results indicate that a statistically significant three-way interaction exists. We present an argument which posits that an individual’s primary language and subsequent familiarity with the primed concepts, in conjunction with individual differences in working memory capacity and mood, plays an important role in determining the most effective strategy used to complete a word-stem completion task.
