Discourse Meaning and Memory

Abstract

1.1. In his new book Walter Kintsch has collected a series of theoretical and experimental papers on the structure and processing of meaning. He mainly studies the propositional structures of discourse and their role in the representation of knowledge in memory, and in the processes of comprehension, inference and recall. The experiments reported have been carried out in the department of psychology of the University of Colorado at Boulder, in part with the collaboration of colleagues and students (Edward J. Crothers, Gregory Glass, Janice M. Keenan, Gail McKoon and Dorothy Monk). The theoretical framework developed in The Representation of Meaning in Memory (henceforth: RMM), presented in the first part of the book, is a further elaboration of Kintsch's work on semantic memory (Kintsch, 1972) and of the ideas on conceptual processes formulated in his earlier book Learning, Memory and Conceptual Processes (1970). The difference with earlier work, however, appears most clearly in the sophistication of the theory and in the extension of the empirical domain to the semantic structures and processes underlying complex sentences, paragraphs and discourse. In agreement with the more general tendency in actual cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, Kintsch draws upon recent developments in logically and semantically based linguistic theories, e.g. generative semantics, case grammar and text grammar. Within psychology itself RMM should be placed in the perspective of various recent attempts to provide the first elements of a theoretically sound explication of important pre-behavioristic ideas about memory and recall, especially those of Bartlett (1932). In particular it is demonstrated, in line with current psycholinguistics, that memory and recall of sentences and discourse is essentially semantic, and that the representation of meaning in memory should be given in terms of propositional structures and inferences.