ABSTRACT
Understanding a text requires building a coherent representation of the situation evoked in the text (Tapiero, 2000; Tapiero & Otero, 1999; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), and several models have attempted to describe the mechanisms involved in elaborating this coherence (Gernsbacher, 1990, 1991, 1996; Kintsch, 1988, 1998; Myers & O’Brien, 1998; van den Broek et al., 1996; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995). At the same time, the recent proposal in psycholinguistics of connectionist models (McClelland & Elman, 1986; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) led researchers to assume that language activities are underlain by the activation and inhibition of related units. The repeated use of the priming paradigm to study language in its various aspects, such as comprehension and production, has also participated in supporting this assumption (for a review, see McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992) for units ranging from words to texts (Gernsbacher, 1991, 1996), and findings using this experimental paradigm have provided evidence of recourse to theories involving both of these mechanisms.
