Many word forms map onto multiple meanings (e.g., "ace"). The current experiments explore the extent to which adults reshape the lexical-semantic representations of such words on the basis of experience, to increase the availability of more recently accessed meanings. A naturalistic web-based experiment in which primes were presented within a radio programme (Experiment 1; N = 1800) and a lab-based experiment (Experiment 2) show that when listeners have encountered one or two disambiguated

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... nces of an ambiguous word, they then retrieve this primed meaning more often (compared with an unprimed control condition). This word-meaning priming lasts up to 40 min after exposure, but decays very rapidly during this interval. Experiments 3 and 4 explore longerterm word-meaning priming by measuring the impact of more extended, naturalistic encounters with ambiguous words: recreational rowers (N = 213) retrieved rowingrelated meanings for words (e.g., "feather") more often if they had rowed that day, despite a median delay of 8 hours. The rate of rowing-related interpretations also increased with additional years' rowing experience. Taken together these experiments show that individuals' overall meaning preferences reflect experience across a wide range of timescales from minutes to years. In addition, priming was not reduced by a change in speaker identity (Experiment 1), suggesting that the phenomenon occurs at a relatively abstract lexical-semantic level. The impact of experience was reduced for older adults (Experiments 1, 3, 4) suggesting that the lexical-semantic representations of younger listeners may be more malleable to current linguistic experience.