ABSTRACT
What are the requirements for an ideal psychological model of text understanding? Such a model would capture the cognitive representations that are constructed during comprehension, and as a result of comprehension. It would specify the processing mechanisms that participate in the construction of these representations. The output of the model would match behavioral indices of online representations and processes, such as think-aloud protocols, reading times, and naming latencies for test words interspersed in the text. The output of the model would also match behavioral indices of the final representation that are achieved after comprehension is complete, such as recall, summarization, question answering, and ratings of the relatedness of text constituents. An ideal model would be applicable to different classes of texts, readers with different cognitive styles, and readers with different reading goals. It would be grounded in major theories of cognition. An ideal model would be specified in enough qualitative or mathematical detail to offer decisive predictions about human thought and behavior.
