ABSTRACT
Our chapter concerns the impact of discourse features on comprehension and argues that much of current work underestimates the complexity of the relationship between features and message understanding. This underestimation results from oversimplifying the comprehension process, failing to recognize cues as possibly impairing understanding, and neglecting to challenge assumptions underlying comprehension models. In this manuscript, we define comprehension, offer a taxonomy of discourse features, examine various comprehension models, and demonstrate the need to study the relation between discourse features and comprehension within the framework of some theory associated with message understanding.
