Five experiments are described on the processing of ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and non-priming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities have two semantically unrelated readings that are nouns (e.g., pen, organ); nounverb ambiguities have both noun and verb readings that are unrelated (e.g., tire, watch). Priming contexts contain a word highly semantically or associatively related to one meaning of the ambiguous word; non-priming contexts favor one meaning of the word through other types of information (e.g., syntactic or pragmatic). In non-priming contexts, subjects consistently access multiple meanings of words, and select one reading within 200 msec. Lexical priming differentially affects the processing of subsequent nounnoun and noun-verb ambiguities, yielding selective access of meaning only in the former case. The results suggest that meaning access is an automatic process which is unaffected by knowledge-based ("top-down") processing. Whether selective or multiple access of meaning is observed largely depends on the sfructure of the ambiguous word, not the nature of the context.

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