ABSTRACT

Even though we acquire much of our knowledge by reading or listening to other people, we sometimes have difficulties in understanding them. The problem often lies not in understanding the words that the other person is using, but in understanding “what the speaker is talking about.” These difficulties arise in understanding how the words and clauses in a sentence are related to other sources of information, such as the previous sentences in the discourse. One simple example of this interrelation among sentences is the way a pronoun is used to refer back to a previously mentioned item. For example, if the sentence He just bought a car occurs within a paragraph, then the referent for he must have been previously established. Comprehension requires more than retrieving a representation of the word he that specifies (+ male) and (+ human). It requires that the comprehender determine the referent of he. This is an example of relating the information in the sentence to other knowledge in order to understand “what it is about.”