ABSTRACT
Since reading and understanding are moderately complex human activities, they are often studied and described from various perspectives. Our approach has focused on the mental processes that extract information from a text and combine those elements to construct a coherent internal representation of the text content (cf. Carpenter & Just, 1977a, 1977b). These processes are influenced by certain linguistic properties of the text, such as foregrounding, pronominal reference, and lexical entailments. We have examined the way in which these constructions initiate and guide comprehension processes. In this paper, we will describe our research on verb-based entailments.
