Cognitive processes in composing and comprehending discourse

Abstract

Cognitive processes involved in literacy tasks are considered from a theoretical viewpoint that develops a unified account for both discourse production and comprehension. This approach identifies two broad categories of discourse processing. Framing processes produce a conceptual structure, or frame, for a text. Regulating processes access language structures, translating conceptual structure into a text for production, and regulating construction of the conceptual structure for comprehension. The approach leads to an analysis of constraints that apply to discourse production and comprehension tasks and to a methodology based on propositional analysis of texts for investigating discourse processes on such tasks. Preliminary results of research on children's story production and comprehension indicate that framing processes are common to both types of tasks.