This paper examined the priming effects of the sentential context and other lexical factors in the processing of ambiguous words. A cross-modal naming task was employed in which listeners named aloud a visual probe as fast as they could, at a pre-designated point upon hearing the sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results from the experiment in general support the context-dependency hypothesis that selection of the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the simultaneous interaction of both sentential and lexical information during lexical access.

Key words: Context effects, Chinese homophones, lexical priming, lexical access