Cognitive Studies – Reading Comprehension Models and Annotations
Leonie Kirchhoff · 2024
This chapter is concerned with a critical review of specific aspects in cognitivist research on literary reading and investigates whether it is possible, based on an analysis of the students' annotations, to determine more specifically if and how literary reading is different from reading any other text.Section 3.1 commences with a brief overview of comprehension models, which reveals three issues that will serve as the basis for the investigation in the following subchapters: (1) the idea of a "mental representation" of a text, (2) the exclusively reader-oriented approach to text comprehension, (3) an inconclusive concept of text.The analysis of the student annotations with regard to these three issues allows for specific conclusions regarding the current state of knowledge about literary understanding in cognitive research.On the one hand, it puts into question the suitability of comprehension models in effectively capturing the complex processes involved in understanding literary texts.On the other hand, it unveils potential avenues for future research, thus paving the way for further exploration in this domain.Section 3.2 discusses the implications the observations may have for further research: firstly, a closer collaboration between cognitivists and literary scholars, and, secondly, the inexpediency of an exclusive focus on quantifiable single-event reader responses as well as "mental representation" when researching literary understanding. Reading Comprehension ModelsCognitive studies have done critical (empirical) groundwork regarding research on reading comprehension.Many of the results have proven an incentive for more research and have given rise to theories on the processes of reading and reading competence (see ch. 1.2.2.1).Cognitive studies may hence be considered a logical starting point for an investigation into the mechanisms of understanding literary texts.A brief review of the literature on reading comprehension, however, suggests that comprehension models have primarily been developed with anything but literary texts in mind.This initial observation is the incentive for the evaluation of current research on comprehension models.