The goal of the proposed research is to construct a comprehensive processing theory of discourse comprehension that can serve as a basis for other research in which discourse comprehension plays a role. The theory that has been elaborated in previous years will be further developed in two ways. First, the psychological processes underlying knowledge use in discourse comprehensive will be specified, simulation models will be constructed, and evaluated empirically. Secondly, the processes by means of which people acquire new knowledge from reading a text will be investigated. Thus the focus of the proposed work is on knowledge use in discourse, and knowledge acquisition (learning) from discourse. Both of these aspects will be treated within the framework of already existing models of discourse comprehension. This work will provide a conceptual foundation for studying language processing both in normal and clinical populations.
