The two meanings of a homophone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Ss were presented with sentences whose main noun was either a homophone or not. Following each sentence, Ss were presented with a single noun and they had to indicate whether it was relevant to the sentence or not. More specifically, irrelevant probes following sentences containing homophones were either irrelevant with respect to both interpretations of the homophone or irrelevant with respect to the present interpretation of the homophone but relevant with respect to its other interpretation. The data suggest that people compare the main noun and the probe, and that in doing so they compute both entries of the homophone noun. No effect was found due to a variation in the delay between the presentation of the sentence and the presentation of the probe.