ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we report on an approach to the study of comprehension that employs a combination of discourse analysis and connectionist modeling. In so doing, we provide a theoretical account for how readers make causal inferences and construct dynamic representations of the text over the course of processing sentences. We focus on how clause information is accessed and integrated during reading. The basis for availability and integration of clauses is the use of knowledge about events, agents, emotions, intentions, goals, plans, actions, and outcomes to understand what happens in narratives. The discourse analysis, based on logical criteria, is used to identify the causal relations that might be inferred by readers between the clauses of the narrative text. The connectionist model integrates each new clause into a narrative context of prior clauses via causal connections between clauses.
