Previous studies on program comprehension were carried out largely in thecontext of procedural languages. Our purpose is to develop and evaluate acognitive model of object-oriented (OO) program understanding. Our model isbased on the van Dijk and Kintsch's model of text understanding (1983). One keyaspect of this theoretical approach is the distinction between two kinds ofrepresentation the reader might construct from a text: the textbase and thesituation model. On the basis of results of an experiment we have conducted, weevaluate the cognitive validity of this distinction in OO programunderstanding. We examine how the construction of these two representations isdifferentially affected by the programmer's expertise and how they evolvedifferentially over time.
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