In the present study, a cross-modal semantic priming task was used to investigate the ability of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) nonfluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) control subjects to use a discourse context to resolve lexically ambiguous words. Subjects first heard four-sentence discourse passages ending in ambiguous words and after an inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of either 0 or 750ms, made lexical decisions on first- or second-meaning related visual targets. NBD control subjects, at the 0ms ISI, only activated contextually appropriate meanings, though significant effects, as a group, were only seen in second-meaning biased contexts. Surprisingly, at the 750ms ISI, these subjects activated both appropriate and inappropriate meanings in first-meaning biased contexts. With respect to the LHD nonfluent aphasic patients, the majority activated first meanings regardless of context at the 0ms ISI, though effects for the group were not significant. At the 750ms ISI, these patients again activated first meanings regardless of context, with significant effects for the group only seen in first-meaning biased contexts. With regard to the RHD patients, the majority activated second meanings regardless of context at the 0ms ISI and first meanings regardless of context at the 750ms ISI, though, as a group, the effects were not significant. In light of our previous findings (Grindrod & Baum, 2003, submitted), the present data are interpreted as supporting the notion that damage to the left hemisphere disrupts either lexical access processes or the time course of lexical activation, whereas damage to the right hemisphere impairs the use of context and leads to activation of ambiguous word meanings based on meaning frequency.