Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

The present study aimed to investigate the frequency of the use of two semantic adjustment strategies; namely, expansion and reduction, in the two English translations of book one of "Masnavi." For this purpose, 300 lines of "Masnavi" by Rumi (2014) along its two corresponding English translations by Nicholson (2004) and…

In garden path (GP) jokes, a first dominant interpretation is detected as incoherent and subsequently substituted by a hidden joke interpretation. Two important factors for the processing of GP jokes are salience of the initial interpretation and accessibility of the hidden interpretation. Both factors are assumed to be affected by contextual…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

What makes a discourse coherent? One potential factor has been discussed in the linguistic literature in terms of a Question under Discussion (QUD). This approach claims that discourse proceeds by continually raising explicit or implicit questions, viewed as sets of alternatives, or competing descriptions of the world. If the interlocutor accepts…

Describes a model that distinguishes seven types of meaning that can function in reading: discoursal, lexical, morphological, propositional, syntactic, rhetorical, and functional. (MKM)

Reviews research concerning instructional applications of discourse analysis for student reading and writing, including large-scale studies of student writing, text-based studies, reading comprehension, and semantic mapping. A large unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

A research project investigated the process of reading comprehension through which the reader generates a semantic representation of the message conveyed by a text. The first focus of the project was an examination of the functioning of abstract knowledge in text comprehension. Studies were conducted to explore the activation of proposition…

Processing time and memory for sentences were examined as a function of the degree of semantic and causal relatedness between sentences in short narratives. In Experiments 1-2B, semantic and causal relatedness between sentence pairs was independently manipulated. Causal relatedness was assessed through pretesting and semantic relatedness was…

Scientific discourse is difficult to read because of its lexical, syntactic, semantic, and logical features. This paper discusses each of those features, giving special attention to syntax, and suggests ways in which discourse analysis can be used to teach content reading in sciences and to rewrite scientific text for instructional purposes. Some…

A study was conducted to find a manipulation that could be performed on a text (roughly analogous to real instructional material) which would lead readers to process that text more efficiently. One-hundred five college students were placed into either an experimental or a control group. Students in the control group were given an unchanged version…

Four versions of several paragraphs had the same second sentence and were referentially coherent, but they differed in causal relatedness of the two sentences. Results showed that despite referential coherence, recognition and recall memory for the causes was poorest for the most and least related causes and best for causes of intermediate…

Explains how semantic webbing (a process for constructing visual displays of categories and their relationships) works with a basal reader story and presents some teaching strategies for effective semantic webbing. (HOD)