J Psycholinguist Res (2006) 35:531–554 DOI 10.1007/s10936-006-9028-5 ORIGINAL PAPER Development of Lexical and Sentence Level Context Effects for Dominant and Subordinate Word Meanings of Homonyms James R. Booth · Yasuaki Harasaki · Douglas D. Burman Published online: 12 October 2006 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006 Abstract Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dom- inant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided into three reading skill groups based on an independent measure of single word oral reading accuracy. There were three main developmen- tal and reading skill findings. First, 9-year-olds and low skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in accuracy. Second, 9- and 10-year-olds or low and moderate skill readers showed lexical level facilitation in reaction time. Third, 12-year-olds or high skill readers showed sentence level facilitation in reaction time with high skill readers additionally showing sentence level inhibition in reaction time. These results show that lexical level context effects decreased and that sentence level context effects increased with development and skill. These results are discussed in terms of con- nectionist models of visual word recognition that incorporate distributed attractor principles. Keywords Homonyms · Development · Semantic · Context Introduction Developmental and Reading Skill Differences in Sentence Context Effects One of the most reliable findings in the literature on individual differences in lexical processing is that younger or less skilled readers show greater priming than older or J. R. Booth (B ) · Y. Harasaki · D. D. Burman Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA e-mail: j-booth@northwestern.edu