Situation Models And Levels Of Coherence

"Situation Models and Levels of Coherence proposes an integrated view of the various theoretical approaches to discourse comprehension, and in particular of situation-model building, as evidenced by empirical findings and computational models. The objective has been to arrive at an in-depth definition of the internal structure of situation models, and of the cognitive processes that underlie their elaboration, while articulating these two aspects of the reader's mental representations by bringing to the fore the core concept of coherence." (cit. 4e p. de couv.).

This volume's goal is to provide readers with up-to-date information on the research and theory of scientific text comprehension. It is widely acknowledged that the comprehension of science and technological artifacts is very difficult for both children and adults. The material is conceptually complex, there is very little background knowledge for most individuals, and the materials are often poorly written. Therefore, it is no surprise that students are turned off from learning science and technology. Given these challenges, it is important to design scientific text in a fashion that fits the cognitive constraints of the learner. The enterprise of textbook design needs to be effectively integrated with research in discourse processing, educational technology, and cognitive science. This book takes a major step in promoting such an integration. This volume: *provides an important integration of research and theory with theoretical, methodological, and educational applications; *includes a number of chapters that cover how science text information affects mental representations and strategies; *introduces important suggestions about how text design and new technologies can be thought of as pedagogical features; and *establishes academic text taxonomies and a consensus of the criteria to organize inferences and other mental mechanisms.

This established text--now revised and updated--reveals how spoken language skills are acquired and how they affect children’s later reading and writing achievement. With a unique focus on the needs of educators, the book examines the foundations of language in the developing brain. It explores the relationship of language processes to core literacy skills and probes the impact of motivational and sociocultural factors on children’s learning. Implications of developmental knowledge for classroom instruction are highlighted, and effective practices reviewed. Revealing vignettes, clear explanations of research, and lists of “main ideas” enhance the text’s accessibility for preservice teachers. New to This Edition *Chapter on emergent literacy and the predictors of reading success. *Incorporates the latest research, including findings from key longitudinal studies. *Increased attention to English learners, low-income children, and children with disabilities. *Updated and expanded topics, including usage-based theories of language acquisition, morphological knowledge in vocabulary and comprehension, phonological processing skills, and writing development.

This volume provides an excellent overview of the field of discourse processes, capturing both its breadth and its depth. World-renowned researchers present the latest theoretical developments and thought-provoking empirical data. In doing so, they cover a broad range of communicative activities, including text comprehension, conversational communication, argumentation, television or media viewing, and more. A central theme across all chapters concerns the notion that coherence determines the interpretation of the communication. The various chapters illustrate the many forms that coherence can take, and explore its role in different communicative settings.

The search for the defining qualities of narrative has produced an expansive range of definitions which, largely unconnected with each other, obscure the notion of “narrativity” rather than clarifying it. The first part of this study remedies this shortcoming by developing a graded macro model of narrativity which serves three aims. Firstly, it provides a structured overview of the field of narrative elements and processes. Secondly, it facilitates the classification of narratological approaches by locating them on different stages of narrativity. Finally, it focuses attention on narrative dynamics as interpretative processes by which readers seek to produce narrative coherence. The second part of this study identifies three different narrative dynamics which characterise Laclos’s "Dangerous Connections," Kafka’s "Castle" and Toussaint’s novels. Wagner bases her analyses of these dynamics not only on the texts themselves but also on the ways in which literary scholars imbue the texts with narrative coherence. This book provides a long overdue systematisation of the jumbled field of theories of narrativity and opens new perspectives on the difficult relationship between narrative theory and interpretation.

What is text understanding? It is the dynamic process of constructing coherent representations and inferences at multiple levels of text and context, within the bottleneck of a limited-capacity working memory. The field of text and discourse has advanced to the point where researchers have developed sophisticated models of comprehension, and identified the particular assumptions that underlie comprehension mechanisms in precise analytical or mathematical detail. The models offer a priori predictions about thought and behavior, not merely ad hoc descriptions of data. Indeed, the field has evolved to a mature science. The contributors to this volume collectively cover the major models of comprehension in the field of text and discourse. Other books are either narrow -- covering only a single theoretical framework -- or do not focus on systematic modeling efforts. In addition, this book focuses on deep levels of understanding rather than language codes, syntax, and other shallower levels of text analysis. As such, it provides readers with up-to-date information on current psychological models specified in quantitative or analytical detail.

This 1990 volume was written to re-examine the long-standing controversy about consistency in personality from a social psychological perspective. Barbara Krahé reconsiders the concept of consistency in terms of the systematic coherence of situation cognition and behaviour across situations. In the first part of the volume she undertakes an examination of social psychological models of situation cognition for their ability to clarify the principles underlying the perception of situational similarities. She then advances an individual-centred methodology in which nomothetic hypotheses about cross-situational coherence are tested on the basis of idiographic measurement of situation cognition and behaviour. In the second part of the volume, a series of empirical studies is reported which apply the individual-centred framework to the analysis of cross-situational coherence in the domain of anxiety-provoking situations. These studies are distinctive in that they extend over several months and use free-response data.