SPATIAL CODING AND DISCOURSE MODELS DURING TEXT READING

Text comprehension involves frequent backtracking through previously r ead material, either accompanied by regressive saccades or not, in ord er to find the elements necessary for the interpretation of words curr ently being inspected. An obvious example is anaphor processing, where reference to an earlier element in the text, and thus the necessity t o backtrack, is marked linguistically (by a pronoun, a definite articl e, a preposition, etc.). Little is known, however, concerning the exac t nature of the text representation(s) used by readers when performing such backtracking. In the present paper, two potential levels of text representation will be discussed: a representation of the text conten t (see, for example, the notion of a discourse model proposed by Garnh am, 1981) and a representation of the surface form of the text, includ ing the spatial locations of words on the screen.