Shallow Semantic Processing of Text: An Individual-Differences Account

Abstract

Abstract We used Barton and Sanford's (1993) anomaly detection task to investigate text processing differences between skilled and less-skilled readers. The results of 2 experiments showed that many readers had the tendency to process text in a shallow or incomplete manner, frequently failing to detect anomalous nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in text such as "Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizers (tranquilizing sedatives)." This finding suggests that not all readers are scrupulous about processing and integrating every word into their mental representation of the text, and will often assume coherence as a default, as long as there is sufficient global coherence. However, it was only the less-skilled readers who had particular difficulty noticing locally anomalous NPs such as tranquilizing stimulants, suggesting that less-skilled readers frequently fail to compute the local meaning of a NP prior to integrating it into the more global representation of the text.