ABSTRACT
The contemporary constructive view of language comprehension, with its attendant emphasis on the role of contextual factors, has many historical antecedents in psychology. The view of language comprehension that emerges is one in which the comprehended is a far more active participant than was thought by psycholinguists of the 1960s under the influence of Chomsky and Katz. The constructive orientation, with its attendant emphasis on the importance of what one already knows in determining what one will come to know, must be considered an improvement over the narrow bottom-up conceptions that earlier dominated thinking about reading. The contemporary constructive view of language comprehension, with its attendant emphasis on the role of contextual factors, has many historical antecedents in psychology. Among the more useful directions being taken related to the constructive processes of prose understanding in children involves investigation of the acquisition of the knowledge structures themselves and of the relationship between prose processing and metacognitive knowledge.
