12. TOPIC: DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION

Discourse comprehension

The process of understanding connected sentences, narratives, and explanatory texts.

Discourse

Interrelated sets of sentences that form a meaningful text or conversation.

Narrative

A story that connects events, characters, causes, and consequences.

Expository text

A text that explains how something works or why something happens.

Why is discourse comprehension complex?

Because readers must connect explicit text with background knowledge, causality, reference, and coherence.

Mental representation

An internal representation of the text and the situation it describes.

Four main aspects of discourse processing

Clause content, reference, cohesion/coherence, and discourse representation.

Referential processes

Processes that connect words in the text to the objects, ideas, or events they refer to.

Cohesion

The linguistic connections between parts of a text.

Coherence

The meaningful connection between ideas, events, and propositions in a text.

Kintsch's Construction-Integration Theory

A theory explaining how readers build coherent mental representations of discourse.

Production system in Kintsch's theory

A system that applies rules to the contents of working memory during comprehension.

Three levels of representation

Surface model, text-base, and situation model.

Surface model

The least abstract representation, containing exact words and syntactic relations.

Why does the surface model decay quickly?

Because exact wording is usually weakly stored and disappears within minutes.

Text-base

A representation of the meaning of the text in the form of connected propositions.

How is the text-base different from the surface model?

It preserves meaning rather than exact wording.

Proposition

A predicate and its arguments, or the smallest unit of meaning that can be true or false.

Predicate

The action, state, or relation expressed in a proposition.

Argument

The participants or objects involved in the predicate.

Example of a proposition

"The customer wrote the company a complaint" can be represented as write [customer, company, complaint].

Macroproposition

A larger meaning unit that connects or summarises several smaller propositions.

Psychological reality of propositions

Evidence suggests propositions are real units in readers' mental representations.

Ratcliff and McKoon's priming evidence

Words from the same proposition serve as better retrieval cues than words from different propositions.

Situation model

A mental simulation of the events, characters, space, time, causality, and emotions described by the text.

Why is the situation model important?

It allows readers to understand what the text is about beyond the exact words.

Highest level of abstraction

The situation model is the most abstract level of representation.

Bransford and Johnson study

They showed that without an appropriate context or image, readers may fail to build a coherent situation model.

Local coherence

Understanding how neighbouring sentences relate to each other.

Global coherence

Understanding how the whole text fits together as a meaningful situation.

Discourse processing cycle

Text is processed in cycles because working memory can handle only limited information at once

Construction phase

The phase in which new text is processed, propositions are extracted, and related knowledge is activated.

Integration phase

The phase in which active propositions are connected to each other and to previous text.

Argument overlap strategy

Connecting propositions by finding shared arguments that refer to the same concept.

Main goal of discourse comprehension

To build a coherent situation model by combining text-based information with world knowledge.