A Paradigm for the missing middle

Abstract

ABSTRACT This commentary highlights what I see as the most important of Walter Kintsch’s many contributions to cognitive psychology and especially text comprehension. His work filled the great void between the top and the bottom in research on comprehension. The state of the field at the time was (a) strong research foundation on word reading, (b) detail-focused research on syntactic processes by a vibrant sentence processing research community, and (c) demonstration research on the importance of higher-level top down influences. The void between (b) and (c) meant there was no possibility of a comprehension science that was both rigorous, like (a) and (b), and reflective of the role of outside-the-text knowledge, like (c). Beyond the specific empirical contributions of Kintsch’s work is that he showed that it was possible to create a paradigm for the missing middle, a characterization of how word-driven and knowledge-driven processes yield a coherent meaning-based understanding of a text a few pieces at a time. This allowed the flourishing of work on the incremental processes that result in a reader’s (often) coherent representation of text meaning.