Thinking about a word's meaning results in a deeper level of encoding than does listening to how it sounds or thinking about how it looks.

Question

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Thinking about a word's meaning requires semantic processing, which involves deeper elaboration and connections to prior knowledge. In contrast, phonological processing (listening to how it sounds) and orthographic processing (thinking about how it looks) both involve surface-level characteristics of the word, which do not necessarily lead to as strong of a memory trace.

Thinking About a Word's Meaning Results in a Deeper Level