In an ingenious experiment, the psycholinguist David Swinney had people listen over headphones to passages like the following: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of his room. Did you notice that the last sentence contains an ambiguous word, bug, which can mean either “insect” or “surveillance device”? Probably not; the second meaning is more obscure and makes no sense in context. But psycholinguists are interested in mental processes that last only
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