Sources of Coherence in Reading

This volume brings together the large body of evidence addressing the roles of text-based and and reader-based sources of coherence in reading comprehension. The contributors present the current state of cognitive theory and research on comprehension of discourse.

During the last 20 years, there has been an enormous amount of research examining sources of coherence in reading. A major tenet of this work has been the distinction between two major sources of coherence. "Text-based" sources of coherence are contained within the text itself -- use of headings to indicate aspects of a text''s macrostructure; "reader-based" sources of coherence encompass the information and strategies that the reader brings to the comprehension process. Many early models of reading comprehension emphasized text-based sources of coherence as a way of understanding how a representation of the text is constructed in memory. However, during the last decade, there has been a clear shift of theoretical perspective away from viewing reading comprehension as a process of representing a text to viewing comprehension as a process of representing what a text is about. This has led to a greater emphasis on reader-based sources of coherence. The purpose of this book is to bring together the large body of evidence addressing the roles of text-based and reader-based sources of coherence in reading comprehension. The contributors present the current state of cognitive theory and research on comprehension of discourse.