ABSTRACT
If context is taken into account in the psychology of text processing at all, it is usually reduced to one or more independent variables that are assumed to affect text understanding, such as goals, task demands, previous knowledge, gender, age, or different types of readers. Although interest in contextual constraints is increasing in psychology, contextual analysis itself remains marginal when compared to the attention to the role of variable text structures and genres, inferences, knowledge, and their mental processing (Graesser & Bower, 1990; van Oostendorp & Zwaan, 1994; Weaver, Mannes, & Fletcher, 1995). Thus, the notion of context may be wholly absent in the subject index of representative recent books on text understanding (Britton & Graesser, 1996).
