DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION
- 1 February 1997
- journal article
- Published by Annual Reviews in Annual Review of Psychology
- Vol. 48 (1) , 163-189
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.48.1.163
Abstract
▪ Abstract The field of discourse processing has dissected many of the levels of representation that are constructed when individuals read or listen to connected discourse. These levels include the surface code, the propositional textbase, the referential situation model, the communication context, and the discourse genre. Discourse psychologists have developed models that specify how these levels are mentally represented and how they are dynamically built during comprehension. This chapter focuses on the meaning representations that are constructed when adults read written text, such as literary stories, technical expository text, and experimenter-generated “textoids.” Recent psychological models have attempted to account for the identification of referents of referring expressions (e.g. which person in the text does she refer to), the connection of explicit text segments, the establishment of local and global coherence, and the encoding of knowledge-based inferences.Keywords
This publication has 89 references indexed in Scilit:
- On babies, bath water, and schemata: A reconsideration of top‐down processes in comprehensionDiscourse Processes, 1995
- The role of temporal segmentation markers in discourse processingDiscourse Processes, 1995
- Beyond text theory: Understanding literary responseDiscourse Processes, 1994
- A parallel distributed processing model of story comprehension and recallDiscourse Processes, 1993
- Network representations of causal relations in memory for narrative texts: Evidence from primed recognitionDiscourse Processes, 1993
- The time course of generating causal antecedent and causal consequence inferencesDiscourse Processes, 1993
- Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative textsDiscourse Processes, 1992
- Toward a taxonomy of coherence relationsDiscourse Processes, 1992
- Working‐memory capacity and the use of elaborative inferences in text comprehensionDiscourse Processes, 1991
- Relational propositions in discourseDiscourse Processes, 1986