One could easily argue that the most commonly studied stimulus set in experimental psychology involves English words. The study of the memory and reading of words has been central to research since Cattell (1886). Words are well-described units that provide the link between perception and meaning, and so have been critical to developments in computational modeling (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), neuroimaging (e.g., Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1989, and conceptions of attention and automaticity (e.g., Neely, 1977;Stroop, 1935), among many other research areas.Given the importance of words as a stimulus set, one might assume that there are relatively straightforward ways to study lexical processing, and that there is a wellconstrained set of findings to which one can appeal in building models of word processing. Although there has been considerable progress in understanding how people process words, there are some clear gaps in the available literature. This paper describes the English Lexicon Project (ELP), which provides a behavioral database for over 40,000 words and nonwords that will help fill some of these gaps. The present description will focus on visual word recognition, although, as described below, the current database has relevance for other aspects of word processing, such as memory and speech production. Before describing the ELP, we will briefly describe the behavioral measures in the database, the limitations in our current knowledge, and how this database will help address these limitations. LEXICAL DECISIONS AND NAMING AS THE BEHAVIORAL TARGETSAlthough there are multiple ways to measure lexical processing (e.g., eye-fixation data, probability of iden- The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

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This article reviews research concerned with processing words that have more than one meaning. Three principal models of ambiguity processing are outlined, and the research on which they are based is discussed. The findings seem best served by a hybrid model that allows for activation to accrue for all meanings, with the degree of activation sensitive to the frequency of the meanings and context. The major results of this field are interpreted in terms of the literature in word recognition. Such interpretation is important because of the guidance that such models may give to ambiguity research and because of the importance that ambiguous words hold for more general models of lexical access. Ambiguity is extremely common in natural language. A single sequence of words may yield more than one interpretation because of different possible relations among deep or surface structure elements or simply because one of the words has more than one meaning. This latter form-lexical ambiguity-has generated more research in the past decade than have the other types, not surprising considering the general preponderance of research at the lexical level of language processing (e.g., Becker, 1980;Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). More than simply a by-product of the interest in lexical processing, however, word-level ambiguity may be viewed as a critical, special case of more general word recognition processes, capable of constraining lexical access models in important ways. There has been little attempt in the past, however, to integrate the lexical ambiguity research into more global models of word recognition.In particular, lexical ambiguity is relevant to the study of the role of context in lexical access, the process by which a presented word makes contact with its representation in longterm memory. Ambiguity normally goes unnoticed by a listener or reader, and it is assumed that the context allows the person I am grateful to Mark Ashcraft and four anonymous reviewers for their criticisms of earlier versions of this article and to Bill Easton for his help in its preparation.Requests for reprints should be sent to

In two experiments the allocation of attention during the recognition of ambiguous and unambiguous words was investigated. In Experiment 1, separate groups performed either lexical decision, auditory probe detection, or their combination. In the combined condition probes occurred 90, 180, or 270 ms following the onset of the lexical-decision target. Lexical decisions and probe responses were fastest for ambiguous words, followed by unambiguous words and pseudowords, respectively, which indicated that processing ambiguous words was less attention demanding than unambiguous words or pseudowords. Attention demands decreased across the timecourse of word recognition for all stimulus types. In Experiment 2, one group performed the lexical-decision task alone, whereas another group performed the lexical-decision task during the retention interval of a short-term memory task. The results were consistent with those from Experiment 1 and showed that word recognition is an attention-demanding process and that the demands are inversely related to the number of meanings of the stimulus. These results are discussed with regard to the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., single vs. multiple lexical entries) and the effect of such a structure on attentional mechanisms.

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