Comprehension

In this landmark volume, Walter Kintsch presents a theory of human text comprehension that he has refined and developed over the past 20 years. Characterizing the comprehension process as one of constraint satisfaction, this comprehensive theory is concerned with mental processes - not primarily with the analysis of materials to be understood. The author describes comprehension as a two-state process: first, approximate, inaccurate representations are constructed via context insensitive construction rules, which are then integrated via a process of spreading activation. In Part I, the general theory is presented and an attempt is made to situate it within the current theoretical landscape in cognitive science. In the second part, many of the topics are discussed that are typically found in a cognitive psychology text. How are word meanings that are identified in a discourse context representations of texts, both at the local and global level? How do texts and the mental models readers construct from them represent situations? What is the role of working memory in comprehension? The book addresses how relevant knowledge is activated during reading and how readers recognize and recall texts. It then draws implications of these findings for how people solve word problems, how they act out verbal instructions, and how they make decisions based on verbal information. Comprehension is impressive in its scope, bringing in relevant ideas from all of cognitive science. It presents a unified, sophisticated theory backed by a wealth of empirical data.