ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1247-1252 www.elsevier.nldocate/pragma Book review Walter Kintseh, Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1998. xvi + 461 pp. $69.95 (hb.), $27.95 (pb.). Reviewed by Arthur Graesser and Shannon Whitten, Department of Psychology, Campus Box 526400, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA. E- mail: a-graesser@ memphis.edu I This is the book to read for anyone who wants to become up-to-date in the field of discourse psychology. What is discourse psychology? Discourse psychologists investigate the psychological mechanisms that underlie the comprehension and pro- duction of discourse (Graesser et al., 1997). These psychological mechanisms include a set of processes that recruit knowledge structures in long-term memory and that result in a representation of the text or utterances. When adults read a story, for example, they perceive the words, group the words into constituents, activate rele- vant world knowledge, construct inferences, and settle on coherent meaning repre- sentations. Each of these component processes takes time. Claims about the process- ing stream are tested in experiments that collect reading times for words or sentences from a sample of readers, or that measure the extent to which particular ideas are activated in the mind of the reader (as reflected in word naming latencies or lexical decision latencies). Each level of representation is coded in some fashion. Claims about the representation are tested in experiments that collect memory protocols, think aloud protocols, truth verification judgments, and many other tasks. A good theory in discourse psychology produces output that has a close fit to the data col- lected in these experiments. A better theory also is articulated in a mathematical model and is compatible with general theories of cognition in the cognitive sciences. Kintsch's theory is currently the most popular and comprehensive theory that exists in the field of discourse psychology. Discourse psychology is an interdisciplinary field in the sense that efforts are made to incorporate the empirical findings and theoretical insights from diverse dis- ciplines in the cognitive sciences. However, it is important to acknowledge that the Partial support for the preparation of this review came from a National Science Foundation grant (SBR 9720314). 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PI: S0378-2166(99)00090-9