ABSTRACT
Skilled reading requires the coordination of numerous component comprehension processes. At the word level, processes are necessary to encode the printed word and access its meaning in memory. At the sentence level, processes are devoted to the formation of structures that specify the syntactic and conceptual relations among words in a phrase or a clause. These processes help to encode propositions, which are abstract units that represent the meaning of a sentence. At the text level, processes are required to construct connections among successive propositions in a text. One important mechanism for linking propositions in memory involves identifying instances of argument overlap. Argument overlap refers to the recurrence of a noun phrase concept in different propositions (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978). Researchers generally agree that the normal execution of such processes results in a text representation comprised of a set of interrelated propositions (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Perfetti, 1985).
