Reviews prior research to stress the functionality of fluidity in making ready information to support comprehension. Explores the fading of ready information, demonstrating how quickly the accessibility of information mutually known to two reunited characters fades when the text engages other topics. Describes a series of phenomena that cohere…

Notes that, since fictional discourse need not reflect prevailing systems of meaning and norms or values, readers gain detachment from their own presuppositions; by constituting and formulating text-sense, readers are constituting and formulating their own cognition and becoming aware of the operations for doing so. (FL)

Discusses three experiments conducted to determine whether inferences that function so as to preserve the coherence of a passage are drawn in the course of comprehension. (Author/FL)

Suggests that two components of natural discourse (pragmatic information and knowledge about discourse style) play a role in memory for the surface form of sentences in discourse. Shows that recognition memory increased as a function of information about the speaker's positive and negative attitudes and that substantial verbatim memory was…

Offers a brief overview of the Structure Building Framework, a simple framework for describing the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse comprehension. Reviews the seminal work on which it is based (the first decade of structure-building research); and recounts the research conducted by the author to test the Structure Building…

Illustrates the existence of meanings in conversation that are not based on the listener's interpretations by analyzing the conversations from a family therapy session. Transcripts of the conversations are appended. (HTH)

Suggests that a factor underlying the complex analysis of prose is amount of elaboration. Reports findings of two experiments supporting this idea. (FL)

Surveys the long-standing, diversified tradition of European research on text and discourse and cites the main sources and overview works in the field. (FL)

Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Demonstrates that (1) in a theory of comprehension, global coherence must refer not just to the availability of a macrostructure, but also to its ease of construction; and (2) the topic-comment assignment at the sentence level can be an important influence on the reader's perception of the passage topic. (FL)

Investigates the management of expertise in advice-giving in the calls to a radio advice line. Analyzes how the expert's talk handles the tension between the personal and public dimensions of advice-giving in such a public forum. (HB)

Reports the findings of a study showing that the importance or salience of a text at the time of reading has little effect on recognition of specific features from the prose. (HTH)

Presents an analysis of prose narratives that allows content to be identified as central and provides a priori rationale for why the content is central. Investigates which content is supportive of, or distracting to, the central content. (FL)

Discusses previous articles in this journal and calls for a new theory of story grammar. (FL)