1 Cultural Linkage between Text and Audience Based on a reception analysis of news comprehension David Mathieu Paper presented at the Second Finnish ‘Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies’ Conference, Aalto University, Otaniemi (Finland), June 6-7 2011 The study of doing comprehension This paper derives from a cross‐cultural study of the comprehension of news presented in Mathieu (2009). This larger study aims at situating comprehension in its determinant of language, culture and cognition and aspires to develop a psychology of reading as it relates to the study of communication. This paper will focus on developing the thesis that comprehension is best understood as a communicative process that binds an implicit cultural relationship between news texts and their intended audiences. More specifically, the argument of this paper is that comprehension is a cultural phenomenon, rather than a matter of perception of a stimulus, and that this cultural dimension is central in that it constrains, i.e. enables as well as disables, the creation of meaning and represents both a source of convergence and divergence in meaning‐making. One main preoccupation of early research on news comprehension (for example: van Dijk, 1987, 1988; Findhal and Höijer, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1981, 1982, 1985; Graber, 1988; Gunter, 1987) has been to measure the level or quality of comprehension through various conditions in which both the characteristics of the text and of the audience varied. In doing so, this kind of research has avoided the study of what people naturally do with text and language (Potter, 2000). Breaking with this tradition then, this project underlines the necessity to pay attention to the processes and resources by which recipients perform comprehension. Hence, the focus of this study is on the how question (how do they comprehend?) rather than the what (what do they comprehend?). The perspective adopted owes much to ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and its concern for the ethnomethods of knowledgeable agents in the performance of everyday life and the reproduction of structures and institutions. In reception studies, comprehension is understood as a social and cultural activity (Schrøder, 2000). On the contrary, in contemporary psychology of discourse processing, comprehension is assumed to be mainly a‐social and a‐cultural (see Graesser [2006] for an account of this position or Zwaan and Singer [2003] for a literature review of comprehension studies in which culture is notably absent). It is obvious that the cultural dimension of comprehension is not problematized adequately in cognitive psychology, due to its methodological and conceptual inclinations (see Mathieu, 2009). What needs to be developed is a psychology of reading that goes beyond the view that cognitive processes are oriented towards perceiving and recovering what is “in there”, which does not make space for the subjectivity and involvement of the reader to be taken into account, other than as error or bias.