Comprehension processes

Reading is ...

A bottom-up process in which readers construct meaning from letters, words, phrases, clauses and sentences (Gough, 1972) through

A top-down process in which readers both comprehend what the writer is trying to say and interpret/personally respond to a text through

• forming a Text model of reading comprehension (Readers construct a network of ideas using the clause-level meaning units; as in the case of semantic proposition formation, repeated ideas linked to other information in the growing network become viewed as main ideas of the text; ideas that do not play roles in connecting new information fade from the network [Kintsch and Rawson, 2005]; background knowledge supports this process by helping readers anticipate the organisational structures/patterns of the text [Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978])
• forming a Situation model of reader interpretation (Readers INTERPRETS the information from the text (i.e. the text model of reading comprehension) in terms of his own background knowledge, task, text difficulty and goals/motivation/attitudes towards text/task/author, e.g. a reader is likely to interpret a text differently depending on whether he believes the text is a mystery novel, a biography or a romantic novel, on whether he believes the author is good, on whether he's reading the text for a classroom assignment, for pleasure, or while studying for an examination, etc.) [Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978];
• Executive control processing (Readers focus SELECTIVE ATTENTION so as to monitor and repair comprehension, resolve ambiguities and reassess/re-establish goals [Baddeley, 2007])

An interactive process in which readers combine bottom-up and top-down processes, which allow them to

• Compensate for a lack of automatic processing in a lower-level skill by slowing down and using additional attentional resources to use higher-level skills [Stanovich, 2000];
• Use knowledge at one level (e.g. syntactic knowledge that the next word must be a noun) to reduce processing needs at other levels (e.g. word recognition) [Just and Carpenter, 1980]