Have We Been Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places? Defining the "Search After Meaning" Principle in Comprehension
Title:
Have We Been Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places? Defining the "Search After Meaning" Principle in Comprehension
Author:
Long, Debra L. Lea, R. Brooke
Appeared in:
Discourse processes
Paging:
Volume 39 (2005) nr. 2-3 pages 279-298
Year:
2005-05-01
Contents:
The last decade of research in text processing has been marked by a debate between opposing views of comprehension: One side emphasizes discourse processing from the bottom-up, the other from the top-down. A central focus of the debate has been the principle of "search after meaning," posited by the top-down, constructionist approach (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994). Our analysis suggests that this principle has two interpretations: (a) Search after meaning guides the activation of text-relevant knowledge early in processing and (b) search after meaning guides the evaluation of previously activated information during integration. We argue that only the later interpretation is viable and, if adopted, dispels much of the conflict between the two approaches. Moreover, we argue that the process by which integration occurs during comprehension has been ignored in much of the empirical literature on text comprehension; however, there are hints that evaluation may play a critical role.
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