Abstract The activation of arousal components for emotion-laden words in English (e.g. kiss, death) was examined in two groups of participants: English monolinguals and Spanish—English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, emotion-laden words were rated on valence and perceived arousal. These norms were used to construct prime—target word pairs that were used in Experiment 2. Monolingual and bilingual participants performed lexical decisions to English word targets in either high arousal, moderate or unrelated conditions. Results revealed positive priming effects in both arousal conditions for both groups of participants. Interestingly, while the baseline conditions were similar across groups, the arousal conditions produced longer latencies for bilinguals than for monolinguals. These data represent the first demonstration of word—word priming in the domain of perceived arousal in a dominant language for monolingual and bilingual speakers. Results are discussed in terms of the representation of emotion words and the structure of emotion in bilingual memory. Keywords: BILINGUALISMEMOTIONAROUSALAFFECTIVE PRIMINGWORD PRIMINGEMOTION-LADEN