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…