A Connectionist Extension to Kintsch's Construction–Integration Model

This article proposes an extension to Kintsch's Construction–Integration (CI) model of text comprehension, which changes its mathematical implementation and emphasizes the connectionist features of the model. Specifically, the extension proposed here (a) simulates the learning process in a connectionist manner by making explicit changes in the connecting values among processing units; (b) takes into account individual differences in prior background knowledge activation and individual ability to make logical inferences, using these parameters to adjust the results of the simulation; and (c) implements an algorithm that constructs the connectivity matrix W from text processing. The proposed extension is tested on existing recall and contradiction-detection data from readers of science texts, and its predictions fit the empirical data better than the CI model's prediction.

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