Accessing the discourse representation during reading

Abstract

The process of text comprehension requires the integration of the information in the sentence currently being read with information previously read. This, in turn, implies that information presented earlier in the text must be accessed. We present a view of that access process as one in which concepts and propositions in the discourse representation resonate in response to related elements in the current sentence, initiating a process that makes available a subset of the information in the representation. In support of our position, we summarize the effects of several variables that have been shown to affect the availability of information in the discourse representation, and we describe a simulation model of the hypothesized resonance process, together with the results of several applications of that model.