ABSTRACT
A fundamental characteristic of a text is that its sentences are not unrelated but cohere. To understand a text, a reader must therefore cognitively establish specific relations between a new statement and the previously read text. The coherence between sentences can be established by different kinds of integration processes: anaphora resolution, memory processes that resonate for words with related meanings (O'Brien, Rizzella, Albrecht, & Halleran, 1998), and more effortful inference processes that are driven by a search for meaning (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994). These processes may work at different levels of a text representation (cf. van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Fletcher, 1994). Anaphora resolution may occur at a linguistic level creating argument overlap (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978), resonance processes may be strongly memorybased, and the more effortful inference processes may occur at the situational level, as suggested by Schmalhofer, McDaniel, and Keefe (2002).
