ABSTRACT
A central component of successful reading is the construction of a functional, coherent representation of the text in memory. This representation reflects the reader's understanding of the individual events in the text and of the relationships among these events. The construction of a representation may be viewed as a problem-solving process in which the reader infers relationships among the ideas, events, and states that are described in the text. Although various kinds of relations may be inferred, causal dependencies have been found to play an especially central role (Black & Bower, 1980; Graesser, 1981; Graesser & Clark, 1985; Trabasso, Secco & van den Broek, 1984; see also the chapters by Keenan, Potts, Golding, and Jennings, by McKoon and Ratcliff, and by Myers in the present volume). That is, the reader draws upon prior knowledge about psychological and physical causality to find causes and consequences of focal events. These causal relations result in the perception of coherence in the text.
