SENTENCES, INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES, AND MULTIPLE TEXTS - 3 ISSUES IN TEXT COMPREHENSION

Three mini-essays review the progress made on two traditional problems and one newer problem in discourse understanding. The first tradition al problem is the relationship between individual sentences and discou rses. The role of discourse factors on sentence comprehension has rece ived continuing attention, whereas the complementary question of sente nces' contribution to discourse comprehension has been neglected. Rece nt work may have redressed this neglect to some extent. The second tra ditional topic is individual differences in discourse comprehension; t he conclusion is that there has been substantial refinement of earlier hypotheses about the basic word and functional memory sources of such differences, whereas research on higher level causal factors remains inconclusive. The newer third problem, the representation of multiple texts, exposes fresh views of problems of discourse, especially the co ntrast between situation and text models. A recent representational Do cuments Model is briefly described. The conclusion suggests some unify ing threads among these three problems.