title: Good-enough language processing: evidence from sentence-video matching.
abstract: This paper investigates how detailed a linguistic representation is formed for descriptions of visual events. In two experiments, participants watched captioned videos and decided whether the captions accurately described the videos. In both experiments, videos depicted geometric shapes moving around the screen. In the first experiment, all of the captions were active sentences, and in the second experiment, half of the captions were active and half were passive. Results of these experiments indicate that participants who only encountered active sentences performed less detailed analyses of the sentences than participants who encountered both active and passive sentences, suggesting that the level of linguistic detail encoded reflects the complexity of the task that participants have to perform. These results are consistent with "good enough" models of language processing in which people process sentences heuristically or syntactically depending on the nature of the task they must perform.
authors: Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, kharkwal@rutgers.edu.
authors: Gaurav
authors: G
authors: Kharkwal
authors: Karin
authors: K
authors: Stromswold
mesh_terms: D002755:Choice Behavior; D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading
references: Cognition. 2004 Sep;93(2):B79-87
references: 15147941
references: Science. 1995 Jun 16;268(5217):1632-4
references: 7777863
references: Perception. 1994;23(3):253-68
references: 7971105
references: Cognition. 1999 Dec 17;73(3):247-64
references: 10585516
references: Cogn Psychol. 2003 Sep;47(2):164-203
references: 12948517
references: Cognition. 2005 May;96(1):1-33
references: 15833305
references: Cognition. 1999 Jun 22;71(2):109-47
references: 10444906
references: Cognition. 2005 Feb;95(1):95-127
references: 15629475
references: Behav Res Methods. 2011 Sep;43(3):679-90
references: 21302025
references: Percept Psychophys. 2006 Aug;68(6):1047-58
references: 17153197
references: Cogn Psychol. 2009 Sep;59(2):154-79
references: 19500784
references: Psychol Rev. 1994 Oct;101(4):676-703
references: 7984711
references: Q J Exp Psychol A. 2004 Jan;57(1):165-82
references: 14681008
references: Perception. 2000;29(8):943-51
references: 11145086
references: Cogn Psychol. 2001 Jun;42(4):368-407
references: 11368528