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Abstract
Annual Review of Psychology
Vol. 48: 163-189 (Volume publication date February 1997)
(doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.48.1.163)
DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION

Arthur C. Graesser ­
Department of Psychology, The University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee 38152


Keith K. Millis ­
Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115


Rolf A. Zwaan ­
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306

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.

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Authors:
Arthur C. Graesser
Keith K. Millis
Rolf A. Zwaan
Keywords:
discourse processing
inferences
reading
text comprehension

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