Three experiments are presented that examine the influence of Emotional Valence and Familiarity of visually presented lexical stimuli on low-level visual processing. The results provide support for the idea that an early process of automatic appraisal acts to preferentially direct attentional resources to Negative or Novel stimuli. The results are discussed with respect to evolutionary considerations.

Backward masking is often used to limit visual processing in studies of word recognition, semantic priming, and text processing. However, the manner in which the masking stimulus interferes with perception of the target is not well understood. Several explanations of the backward masking effect are considered, a termination hypothesis, an attention capture hypothesis, and a capacity sharing hypothesis. A point of distinction, the effect of manipulating the processing demands of the masking stimulus, is tested in two experiments. Frequency in print of the masking stimulus is manipulated in a first experiment and both frequency and repetition of the masking stimulus are tested in the second. The results disconfirm two of the hypotheses, termination and attention capture, and support the capacity sharing hypothesis.

Non-cognate French-English homographs, i.e., identical lexical items with distinct meanings in French and in English, such as pain, four, main, etc., are used to study the organization of bilingual memory. Bilingual lexical access is initially shown to be compatible with a parallel search through independent lexicons, where the search speed through each lexicon depends on the level of activation of the associated language. Particular attention is paid to reaction times to "unbalanced" homographs, i.e., homographs with a high frequency in one language and a low frequency in the other. It is claimed that the independent dual-lexicon model is functionally equivalent to an activation-based competitive-access model that can be used to account for priming data that the dual-lexicon model has difficulty handling.

This paper presents two expenments providing strong support for an interactive-activation interpretation of bilingual memory. In both experiments French-English interlexical noncognate homographs were used, i.e., words like fin (= "end" in French), pain (= "bread" in French), that have a distinct meaning in each language. An All-English condition, in which participants saw only English items (word and non-words) and a Mixed condition, with half English and half French items, were used. For a set of English target words that were strongly primed by the homographs in the All-English condition (e.g., shark, primed by the homograph fin), this priming was found to disappear in the Mixed condition. We suggest that this is because the English "component" of the homograph is inhibited by the French component which only becomes active in the Mixed condition. Further, recognition times for these homographs as words in English were sigmficantly longer in the Mixed condition and the amount of this increase was related to the relative strength (in terms of printed-word frequency) of the French meaning of the homograph. We see no reasonable independent-access dual-lexicon explanation of these results, whereas they fit easily into an interactive-activation framework.