Abstract
Two experiments investigated the processing of ambiguous words. In the first, lexical decisions were made to words related to the dominant or the subordinate meanings of homograph primes. Only responses for dominant associates were facilitated relative to unrelated words. In the second experiment, ambiguous words ended sentences that varied in the degree to which they biased the dominant or the subordinate meaning of the homograph. Following ambiguous sentences, dominant meanings were retrieved first. When the sentence was strongly biased toward either meaning, only that meaning was retrieved. Only when the sentence was weakly biased toward the subordinate meaning was more than one meaning retrieved. Dominance and context apparently make independent contributions to the processing of ambiguous words.
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