The On-line Construction of Discourse Models

This paper discusses the on-line interpretation of texts within the framework of the mental models theory of discourse comprehension. In the first part, we discuss some general issues: the nature of the representations constructed, the time course of interpretation within a sentence, and the incremental construction of discourse models. In the second part, we discuss the specific problem of anaphor interpretation. After setting this issue in the general context provided by the first part of the paper, we introduce the notion of an incomplete interpretation of a text, which we make explicit in terms of mappings between the roles that people and things play in different sentences of a text, and between roles and names. We use the idea of an incomplete interpretation to explain some discrepancies between experimental findings that we have obtained separately.