to respond as quickly as possible once the probes were processed (i.e. once they understood them). The test assumed that multiple meanings are activated at the moment an ambiguity is encountered in a sentence, which primes related concepts. Swinney's anticipated quicker recognition of concepts, once related concepts were primed and thus activated, as opposed to words that had not been activated. Selected Research "Lexical Access During Sentence Comprehension (re) Consideration of Context Effects" David Swinney (1979) This study utilized a CMPT, in order to investigate the process by which people resolve lexical ambiguity. Specifically, do people access all meanings of words at such moments, or only one meaning? Subjects listened to pre-recorded series of sentences that contained ambiguous words. These words were equibiased—meaning that there were two possible meanings of each ambiguous word and that one meaning was not favored over the other in common speech. The subjects were informed that they would be tested on their comprehension of these sentences. For example, subjects were presented with the utterance: "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room." Here, the word "bugs" was determined to be ambiguous and equibiased towards the meaning of either "insects" on one hand, or "surveillance" on the other. At the moment of the utterance "… bugs" either "ANT" or "SPY" or an unrelated word such as "SEW" or non-word, were flashed on the screen. Study participants were asked to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the string of letters was a word or not. Additionally, context conditions varied in that some had no biasing context, as above, or they strongly biased the listener towards one meaning or another. For example, "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches and other bugs in the corner of the room." Swinney claimed that if a person activates both meanings of an equibiased ambiguous word simultaneously, then the response times should be the same regardless of which meaning is primed by the stimulus. However, if one meaning or another is activated, then the response time should be quicker for the priming of that meaning. Results indicated that listeners accessed multiple meanings for ambiguous words, even when faced with strong biasing contexts