Aspects of Skill in Understanding High-Order Semantic Relations

摘要

An essential element in text comprehension is the reader's ability to integrate newly encountered propositions with those previously encoded into a coherent model of text meaning. Two bases for propositional integration may be: (a) the network of abstract semantic relations, represented linguistically through conjunctions, verbs and other connectives, and (b) the semantic content of related propositions, represented in, for example, argument repetition, collocation and semantic entailment. The purpose of this research was to develop an understanding of the nature of expertise in using information from these sources in integrating semantically related propositions and to identify sources of comprehension difficulty for the less skilled reader.