Psychological research concerning several aspects of the relationship between existing knowledge schemata and the processing of text is summarized in this report. The first section is concerned with dynamic processes of story understanding, with emphasis on the integration of information. The role of prior knowledge in accommodating parts of…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

Developments in linguistics, particularly in Europe in the work of T.A. Van Dijk, a broader conception of texts that shows promise for the study of reading. Textlinguistics covers a domain of linguistics studies that are involved with texts. Textlinguists are interested not only in those obvious immediate connecting mechanisms, such as anaphora,…

Explores some critical questions concerning the nature and functions of the dimension of audience-personification in rhetorical discourse. (MH)

Presents several rules for conversational interpretation of indirect responses to questions. (MH)

The purpose of the model is to select either Spanish or English as the language to be used; its goals at this stage of development include modeling code-switching for lexical need, apparently random code-switching, dependency of code-switching upon sociolinguistic context, and code-switching within syntactic constraints. (EJS)

The structure of any and all written discourse can be described using four basic relationships (those implied by "therefore,""but,""and then," and "and") and three combined relations between sentences and clusters of sentences. (DD)

Discusses redundancy in language and proposes an operational definition which could be used in studying the effects of redundancy on communication between writer and reader. (MKM)

Presents various theories that define the structure of the narrative as a combination of sequences, and as tending to impose order on the universe. (AM)

Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

A text was presented on three levels with regard to lexical density (LD - the quota of lexical words/total amount of words in a sentence). 132 subjects' comprehension of the text (discourse comprehension) was tested by a knowledge test and by subjective ratings. Results for discourse and single-sentence analysis were discussed as well as…