Discourse Comprehension

The chapters in this collection began as talks at a Boulder, Colorado conference held to celebrate Walter Kintsch's sixtieth birthday. The presentations differed widely in subject, but each had been shaped to some degree by Kintsch's ideas.

The editors aimed to recognize the many kinds of researchers and fields Kintsch had touched. The result is an unusually varied group of contributors, with scholars from six countries taking part.

The chapters loosely follow three lines of Kintsch's work: text-based representations, which explain how a text's meaning is assembled; situation models, which capture what a text is about rather than its literal wording; and the construction-integration model, his most recent contribution to the study of discourse comprehension.