ABSTRACT
In this paper we will discuss certain aspects of discourse comprehension with reference to individual differences. The first section briefly describes some general principles of discourse structure and processing, relying in large part on emerging views in cognitive psychology. These principles emphasize particularly the role of sentence and thematic structures in discourse comprehension. In the second section, we discuss possible sources of individual differences in discourse processes. Next, we report some contrastive research on comprehension skill that may serve to constrain theories of individual differences in comprehension. Finally, we propose that certain verbal processes involved in the short-term encoding of linguistic information and in the retrieval and use of word names and meanings may be a greater source of individual differences than structure-related strategies. Throughout the discussion, we assume that comprehension by listening and comprehension by reading are very similar at some sufficiently deep level of analysis and will be referring to their common components more than their distinctive ones.
