Because speed alone is used as the criterion for automaticity, the mental-model theory is mischaracterized by the minimalist hypothesis. It is precisely the idea that automaticity and speed are synonymous in the minimalist hypothesis that demands that we know the speed at which we can consider a process as being automatic. It would be very hard to falsify the minimalist hypothesis if we could not specify how fast an inference had to be in order to be considered automatic. The minimalist hypothesis seems to attack mental-model theory based on definitions of terms not entertained by most other researchers. Garnham's arguments to demonstrate that the notion of a complete representation is incoherent seem very compelling to me.
Processing also seems to be partial or incomplete, at least in some situations.
It seems difficult to explain these results within a minimalist approach which requires local semantic coherence to be established before the phrase is integrated into a larger unit of meaning. The data are not clean enough to make very strong claims, however. The second wave of subjects did not replicate the effect observed for the first wave. A false dichotomy in theories of inference during reading. Mental models contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension.