Change detection: The effects of linguistic focus, hierarchical word level and proficiency

A version of the change-detection paradigm was used to examine Good-Enough Representation (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002). Participants read sentence pairs where a subject noun (e.g., flower) could change to a Superordinate (e.g., plant), Subordinate (e.g., rose), or an Unrelated (e.g., prince) noun. The task was completed cross-linguistically for bilinguals, where the first sentence appeared in English (L1) and the second in French (L2). Linguistic focus was also manipulated. Change detection was extremely high in all conditions in the monolingual sample. In the bilingual sample, focused changes were detected more often, as were changes to unrelated words. Proficiency was related to change detection for monolinguals and bilinguals. The relationships between these and other participant and stimulus variables are also explored.