Defines quantitative-discourse psychology. Illustrates its practice in five research projects, all of which examined naturalistic discourse, investigating: reading time; inference generation; construction of multiple agents (narrators, characters) in literary short stories; tutorial dialog; and dialog patterns in two-party conversations. Notes a…

Argues that researchers in the area of discourse comprehension and mental representation of discourse will likely feel motivated to adopt highly quantitative research techniques described in the articles in this special issue. Notes that ability to do so will be enhanced by availability of well-documented, easy-to-use computer software, or…