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Discourse Comprehension

Essays in Honor of Walter Kintsch

• Edited by III, Charles A. Weaver, Suzanne Mannes, C. Randy Fletcher

• Price: $55.00
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 440
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 1st February 1995
• ISBN: 978-0-8058-1535-1

About the Book

This volume is derived from presentations given at a conference hosted in Boulder, Colorado in honor of the 60th birthday of Walter Kintsch. Though the contents of the talks, and thus the chapters, varied widely, all had one thing in common -- they were inspired to some degree by the work of Walter Kintsch. When making plans for an edited book centered around this conference, the editors had a primary goal: to acknowledge the wide variety of researchers and research areas Kintsch had influenced. As a consequence, one of the more unusual elements of this volume is the diversity of the contributors.

Researchers from six different countries contributed chapters to this book which is loosely organized around three main thrusts of Kintsch's work:
* text-based representations that explain how meaning in a text is constructed,
* situation models which represent what the text is about rather than what a text literally says, and
* the construction-integration model, Kintsch's most recent work in discourse comprehension.

Table of Contents

Contents: Preface. P.G. Polson, Walter Kintsch: A Brief Biography. C.A. Perfetti, M.A. Britt, Where Do Propositions Come From? W.K. Estes, A General Model of Classification and Memory Applied to Discourse Processing. B.B. Murdock, Primacy and Recency in the Chunking Model. J.G. Greeno, Understanding Concepts in Activity. G. McKoon, R. Ratcliff, The Minimalist Hypothesis: Directions for Research. A.C. Graesser, R.A. Zwaan, Inference Generation and the Construction of Situation Models. M.A. Gernsbacher, Activating Knowledge of Fictional Characters' Emotional States. M.A. McDaniel, D. Blischak, G.O. Einstein, Understanding the Special Mnemonic Characteristics of Fairy Tales. C.A. Weaver, III, D.S. Bryant, K.D. Burns, Comprehension Monitoring: Extensions of the Kintsch and van Dijk Model. C.R. Fletcher, E.J. Arthur, R.C. Skeate, Top-Down Effects in a Bottom-Up Model of Narrative Comprehension and Recall. I. Tapiero, G. Denhière, Simulating Recall and Recognition by Using Kintsch's Construction-Integration Model. J.M. Keenan, T.M. Jennings, Priming of Inference Concepts in the Construction-Integration Model. W. Schönpflug, K.B. Esser, Memory and Its Graeculi: Metamemory and Control in Extended Memory Systems. F. Schmalhofer, The Acquisition of Knowledge from Text and Example Situations: An Extension to the Construction-Integration Model. F.C. Staub, K. Reusser, The Role of Presentational Structures in Understanding and Solving Mathematical Word Problems. S. Mannes, S. Doane, Beyond Discourse: Applications of the Construction-Integration Model. S.R. Goldman, S. Varma, CAPping the Construction-Integration Model of Discourse Comprehension. J.F. Arocha, V.L. Patel, Construction-Integration Theory and Clinical Reasoning. T.A. van Dijk, On Macrostructures, Mental Models, and Other Inventions: A Brief Personal History of the Kintsch-van Dijk Theory. S. Mannes, Epilogue.