ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of studies on knowledge and the processing of narrative text. It focuses upon the role of knowledge in processing expository text, drawing comparisons to narrative when appropriate. The chapter suggests that knowledge about focal propositions is related to knowledge about human actions and considers strategies related to the application of other types of knowledge. It discusses the role knowledge of human actions in comprehending and remembering simple narratives. In general, it is assumed that schemata play an important role in encoding, recalling, summarizing, producing, and learning from narratives. Research on summarization has lead to the development of models that try to explain how individuals are able to select and summarize the important aspects of a story. The influence of specialized knowledge upon the comprehension of narrative text has been pursued via an extension of the novice-expert contrastive paradigm to text processing.
