CHAPTER 21
Text Comprehension and Discourse Processing
KIRSTEN R. BUTCHER AND WALTER KINTSCH
575MEMORY AND TEXT COMPREHENSION 576
Working Memory 576
Long-Term Working Memory in Discourse
Comprehension 577
ASPECTS OF COMPREHENSION 580
Memory for Text 580
Inferences 581
Learning From Text 582
Domain Knowledge 583
Text Factors 583
Conversation 584
Purpose and Interest 585
MODELS OF COMPREHENSION 586
Schema-Based Models 586
A Psychological Process Model 586
The Construction-Integration Model 587
The Collaborative Activation-Based Production System
Architecture 588
The Capacity-Constrained Construction-Integration
Model 589
The Landscape Model 589
MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION 589
WordNet 590
Latent Semantic Analysis 590
CONCLUSIONS 592
REFERENCES 593Psychology is a newcomer to discourse analysis, which has
been practiced for a long time by other disciplines. Indeed,
discourse analysis in the form of rhetoric was among the first
disciplines studied in our culture. This tradition continues
strongly into our days, but it has spawned many offshoots,
both within philosophy and beyond: Formal semantics has a
long tradition (e.g., Seuren, 1985); within linguistics, text lin-
guistics became important in the 1970s (Halliday & Hasan,
1976; van Dijk, 1972); natural language processing by com-
puters and computational linguistics became prominent in the
1980s (e.g., Jurafsky & Martin, 2000); and, at about the same
time, models of how discourse is processed were developed
through cooperation of linguists, computer scientists, and
psychologists (e.g., W. Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Schank &
Abelson, 1977) as a branch of the new cognitive science.
Research of the latter type is the concern of this chapter.
Before we focus on psychological process models of dis-
course comprehension, a comment is required on the two
major issues that have existed throughout the long history of
discourse analysis and that are still unresolved. The first con-
troversy has to do with a difference in viewpoint. Some
discourse analysts view language essentially as a means for
information transmission. A speaker or writer intends to
transmit information to a listener or reader. Information is
factual, propositional. Researchers in this tradition focus on
story understanding, memory for factual material presented
in texts, learning from texts, and the inferences involved in
this process. Examples of this approach are, for instance, the
psychological work of W. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) and
the linguistic work reviewed by Lyons (1977). However, in-
formation transmission is only one function of language. So-
cial interaction is another, and a competing research tradition
focuses on this aspect of discourse. Language is often used
not to transmit information, but rather to establish social
roles, to regulate social interactions, to amuse, and to enter-
tain. Labov (1972) or H. H. Clark (1996) exemplify this re-
search tradition. Although most students of language would
agree that both approaches are legitimate and valuable, the
obviously desirable integration of these fields of research has
not yet been achieved.
Since the days of Aristotle and Plato, some have viewed
language as basically orderly and logical, at least in its under-
lying essence, while others have claimed that language is
messy and anomalous by its very nature. The former tra-
dition has tended to develop logical and mathematical theo-
ries of language. Such theories can be both elegant and highly