DISCOURSE COMPREHENSION AND

This paper discusses discourse comprehension with respect to individual differences. First, some general principles of discourse structure and the processing of discourse are presented. These principles emphasize the role of sentence and thematic structure. Second, possible sources of individual differences in discourse processing are discussed. Third, research that compares various specific skills in people of differing comprehension abilities is reported. Finally, the authors propose that verbal processes involved in the short-term encoding of language information and in retrieval and use of word names and meanings are a greater source of comprehension skill differences than are strategies related to discourse structure. (Author) Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished * materials not available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort