Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Text comprehension results from word‐by‐word, phrase‐by‐phrase, and sentence‐by‐sentence processes that are challenging to study. So, research started at the other end – where global structures could be seen as shaping local word and sentence processes. Early artificial intelligence (AI) systems started with global organizers for restricted situational comprehension (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Similarly, approaches within psychology and education also emphasized situated conceptual structures or schemata (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Evidence for global top‐down guidance came from studies showing that a nearly incomprehensible text could be understood with a helpful title (Bransford & Johnson, 1972) and that a text lacking referential specificity could be understood as being about either music or card playing depending on whether the reader was a student in music education or physical education (Anderson et al., 1977).

Other approaches focused on more generalized mental structures (e.g., story grammars, Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979) that guide narrative comprehension. Trabasso and colleagues (1984) argued that people seek causality in reading stories and showed that causal expectations predict how readers understand sentences (Trabasso & Suh, 1993). In Reading Systems Framework terms, these approaches focus on the general knowledge component and largely ignore comprehension processes. They provide demonstrations of global influence without dealing with the nuts and bolts of comprehension.