ABSTRACT
We examined individual variation in the integration of conceptual and linguistic knowledge during discourse processing. Skilled and average processors received sentences that were strongly or weakly supported by context. To reduce the contribution of special processing strategies, the syntactic constructions and topics were highly familiar. The interactions of context with linguistic processing were more constrained by sentential connectives for skilled processors, but less constrained by imposed reading units, which varied from words to incomplete sentences to complete sentences. These results suggest that a characteristic of expertise in discourse processing is an almost continual focus on organizing the results of linguistic processing into a conceptual framework. The results are discussed in terms of an interactive model with autonomous processors, but with shared resources for attending to the products of these processors.
