Language/Discourse Comprehension and Understanding

Definition Discourse comprehension involves building meaning from extended segments of language, such as novels, news articles, conversations, textbooks, and other everyday materials. Successfully comprehending larger units of text and discourse requires making inferences to connect ideas bothwithin and across local and global discourse contexts. Establishing such connections relies on the integration of information from prior discourse contents, as well as from prior knowledge, in order to build a coherent memory representation for the events and concepts the text describes. Following successful comprehension, the resultant discourse representation can be retrieved, updated, manipulated, and applied in order to answer questions and solve problems.