ABSTRACT
Over the Over the last two decades, language processing researchers have proposed models to explain how it is that people come to understand connected text and spoken language, a medium known as discourse. This chapter describes three models of discourse comprehension that have come to dominate the field of psycholinguistics: Kintsch and van Dijk's ever-evolving model of text comprehension, presently under the name of the Construction-Integration Model; Sanford and Garrod's Memory-Focus Model; and Gernsbacher's Structure Building Framework. The Kintsch and van Dijk model combined Kintsch's earlier psychology-based work on units of meaning, which were called propositions with van Dijk's functional linguistics-based work on the rules of discourse which were called macro-operators for transforming propositions. The general cognitive mechanism of suppression found in Gernsbacher's Structure Building Framework resembles the process of integration found in Kintsch's Construction-Integration model. Gernsbacher demonstrated the role that both the mechanisms of suppression and enhancement play in how comprehenders understand anaphoric devices.
