The influential first volume of the Handbook of Reading Research, published in 1984, was out of print for a number of years. This classic work, newly reprinted and available once again, includes comprehensive, authoritative, and effectively written chapters from a variety of research perspectives. With the breadth to appeal to a wide audience, yet the depth to speak authoritatively to various subgroups within that audience, this volume is an essential resource for researchers, students, and professionals across the field of reading and literacy education.

This book brings together linguistics and psycholinguistics. Text representation is considered a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding.The focus is on referential and relational coherence and the role of linguistic characteristics as processing instructions from a text linguistic and discourse psychology point of view. Consequently, this book presents various research methodologies: linguistic analysis, text analysis, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, argumentation analysis, and the experimental psycholinguistic study of text processing. The authors compare, test, and evaluate linguistic and processing theories of text representation.A state of the art volume in an emerging field of interest, located at the very heart of our communicative behavior: the study of text and text representation.

This collection features papers addressing current issues in reading comprehension from cognitive and linguistic perspectives. Organized into three sections, the volume investigates text considerations and reader-text interactions. Each paper presents a substantial and comprehensive review of theory and research related to cognition and reading comprehension.

This book highlights cutting-edge research relevant to the building of a computational model of reading comprehension, as in the processing and understanding of a natural language text or story. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of reading, with contributions from computer science, psychology, and philosophy. Contributors cover the theoretical and psychological foundations of the research in discussions of what it means to understand a text, how one builds a computational model, and related issues in knowledge representation and reasoning. The book also addresses some of the broader issues that a natural language system must deal with, such as reading in context, linguistic novelty, and information extraction.

Originally published in 1985, the various chapters in this volume give examples of research on all three aspects of text understanding – namely, structure, world knowledge and process. More than this, however, the research described represents a shift in emphasis from studying stories, which dominated the field in the late 1970s, to studying expository text. This focus on stories was probably due to the essential first step in any science of examining the simplest materials possible. However, the editors thought that it was time to shift the research focus from stories to expository text and this volume is their attempt to provide this transition.

In Volume III, as in Volumes I and II, the classic topics of reading are included--from vocabulary and comprehension to reading instruction in the classroom--and, in addition, each contributor was asked to include a brief history that chronicles the legacies within each of the volume's many topics. However, on the whole, Volume III is not about tradition. Rather, it explores the verges of reading research between the time Volume II was published in 1991 and the research conducted after this date. The editors identified two broad themes as representing the myriad of verges that have emerged since Volumes I and II were published: (1) broadening the definition of reading, and (2) broadening the reading research program. The particulars of these new themes and topics are addressed.