Sentences, individual differences, and multiple texts: Three issues in text comprehension

Abstract

Three mini‐essays review the progress made on two traditional problems and one newer problem in discourse understanding. The first traditional problem is the relationship between individual sentences and discourses. The role of discourse factors on sentence comprehension has received continuing attention, whereas the complementary question of sentences’ contribution to discourse comprehension has been neglected. Recent work may have redressed this neglect to some extent. The second traditional topic is individual differences in discourse comprehension; the 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 contrast between situation and text models. A recent representational Documents Model is briefly described. The conclusion suggests some unifying threads among these three problems.

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