ABSTRACT
Within the discipline of psychology two prominent domains of inquiry into reading are cognitive science and motivation theory. From the vast variety of investigations in cognitive science that include studies of the brain, language, speech, and thinking, we focus on one salient contribution made by Daniel Kahneman. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work with Amos Tversky, emphasizing how our intuition and reasoning work together. Remarkably, two theories of reading comprehension, developed from cognitive perspectives, show striking parallels with the inner workings of intuition and reasoning portrayed in Kahneman’s research. Specifi cally, the landscape theory of van den Broek and the compensatory encoding theory of Walczyk both reveal intuitive qualities as well as reasoning processes in reading comprehension. Understanding the interplay of these processes can inform our viewpoints about the development of mature reading comprehension.
