Two hypotheses concerning the nature of lexical access, the exhaustive access and the terminating ordered search hypotheses, were examined in two separate studies using a crossmodal lexical priming task. In this task, subjects listened to sentences that were biased toward either the primary interpretation (a meaning occurring 75% or more of the time) or a secondary interpretation (a meaning occurring less than 25% of the time) of a lexical ambiguity that occurred in each sentence. Simultaneously, subjects made lexical decisions about visually presented words. Decisions to words related to both the primary and secondary meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated when presented immediately following occurrence of the ambiguity in the sentence. This effect held under each of the two biasing context conditions. However, when they were presented 1.5 sec following occurrence of the ambiguity, only visual words related to the contextually relevant meaning of the ambiguity were facilitated. These results support the exhaustive access hypothesis. It is argued that lexical access is an autonomous subsystem of the sentence comprehension routine in which all meanings of a word are momentarily accessed, regardless of the factors of contextual bias or bias associated with frequency of use.Much of the work that has examined the effects of various sentential and nonsentential contexts upon lexical access has focused on the processing of lexical ambiguities. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The various meanings of unsystematic lexical ambiguities can be differentiated rather easily, thus allowing examination of the selective effects of different contextual conditions upon the functional activation of those meanings. Given the large number of lexical ambiguities in the language (and the related fact that nearly all words exhibit some type of indeterminacy in characterizations of their meaning), this approach to examining lexical access, and the effects of context upon that access, seems well-founded. This work has led to a number of the established facts and current theories about lexical processing.Before directly considering the status of these theories, however, it is worth noting that a great number of the facts that have been discovered about lexical processing are intimately tied to the various methodologies that were used to discover them. While this is

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