DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION

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 propo sitional textbase, the referential situation model, the communication context, and the discourse genre. Discourse psychologists have develop ed models that specify how these levels are mentally represented and h ow they are dynamically built during comprehension. This chapter focus es on the meaning representations that are constructed when adults rea d written text, such as literary stories, technical expository text, a nd experimenter-generated ''textoids.'' Recent psychological models ha ve attempted to account for the identification of referents of referri ng expressions (e.g. which person in the text does she refer to), the connection of explicit text segments, the establishment of local and g lobal coherence, and the encoding of knowledge-based inferences.