Homophone (HP) priming occurs when phonologically ambiguous words persistently coactivate their contextually irrelevant meanings. If suppressing those meanings fails, they subliminally bias preferences. Yet, it is unclear if prior findings generalize beyond individual words and to bilingual contexts. This has implications for consumer behavior and the debate on differences between first (L1) and second language (L2) lexical processing. We present four multi-item experiments with German–English bilinguals. An initial eye-tracked primed choice task established that homophones affect decision making. Three visual preference experiments with written and/or auditory primes and high- or low-proficiency L2 users found that homophones bias preferences more in L1 than L2. The L1–L2 gap widened if listening or low proficiency made suppression more difficult. We argue that the interplay between reduced suppression in L2 as predicted by activation–suppression models and lower subjective frequency of L2 homophones assumed by the frequency lag hypothesis explain the size of the L1–L2 priming gap.
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