Abstract
A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the full details of word meanings are not always incorporated into the interpretation and that the degree of semantic detail in the representation is a function of linguistic focus. The results provide evidence for the idea that representations are only good enough for the purpose at hand (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002).
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This research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grants R000223622 and R000239888.
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Sturt, P., Sanford, A.J., Stewart, A. et al. Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: An application of the change-detection paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11, 882–888 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196716
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196716