ABSTRACT
This paper examines the rapid psychological processes that integrate information across the sentences of a paragraph. Successive sentences and propositions of a paragraph build on each other, make reference to shared concepts, and are interrelated in structure and content. In order to understand the coherence of a paragraph, a reader must internally integrate its sentences; this integration process is one of the themes of the paper. A second theme is a methodology for monitoring the integrative processes. This methodology involves tracking eye fixations during reading. The research we will review in the first section of the paper and the new research we will present in the second section suggests that there is a highly systematic relationship between eye fixations and underlying comprehension processes. For example, readers have a tendency to look back to a previous sentence or phrase that is related to the one they are reading. In other words, a semantic relation between two sentences is sometimes manifested as an eye-movement between the two sentences. These regressive eye fixations are indicative of the reader’s interpretation of the paragraph. The rapid behavior of the eye-movement system allows us to track the integrative processes and build toward a theory of prose comprehension.
